


old situations (new complications)

by ChibiSquirt, DrowningByDegrees-Art (DrowningByDegrees)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst and Humor, Fluff and Angst, In spite of the torture and pseudo character death it's really quite wholesome, M/M, NSFW Art, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, SHIELD Agent Bucky Barnes, Shrunkyclunks, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Steve Rogers Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-03-31 13:41:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13976316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiSquirt/pseuds/ChibiSquirt, https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningByDegrees/pseuds/DrowningByDegrees-Art
Summary: A soulmate AU where your soulmark is the first thing your soulmate thinks when they meet you.Bucky is a normal, Level Six SHIELD agent who stumbles into a time machine while on a mission.  When he travels back sixty-four years and lands ass-up on the wartime desk of one Agent Carter, his soulmark—“Who’s that with Peggy?”—goes fromfairly distinctive,as thoughts go, tomaddeningly common.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Who doesn't love a good soulmark AU? This fic is largely fluff, but does have moments of darkness. If you're concerned, there's a more explicit warning in the end-note. DrowningByDegrees has made ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL and also VERY HOT art for this fic!!! Are you excited? You definitely should be! But you should also be aware that the fic will therefore contain NSFW art.
> 
> Much thanks to Newsbypostcard for editing, and to the SBBSurvivors slack for existing. If any of y'all demons actually writes the Steve/Shrek thing I'm disowning all of you and burning my computer to the ground. *blows kisses* 
> 
> I encountered a formatting issue while posting where random punctuation marks were replaced with periods. I think I fixed everything, but I keep finding remnants of it, so if you spot something please feel free to drop me a note saying so.

* * *

**August, 2007:**

* * *

 

“Barnes, cautious advance. We don’t know what they were storing in here, but whatever you find is going to have to go straight to the science department.”

“Copy that.”

Bucky Barnes kept his gun up, using its light to guide hi. way through the warehouse. He hoped whatever was stored in here wasn’t anything temperature-dependent, because the electricity in this place had clearly been off for some time. The air was musty in a way that only came when it had been sitting still for months, and the only other living being Bucky had encountered so far was the near-sentient mold in the coffee pot.

His partner, SHIELD Agent Olewalokami Mbondu, was stationed out back, ready to take out anyone who might have tried to escape that way, but they both privately knew there wasn’t going to be anyone. This place was too old, too abandoned, to have anyone in it. Bucky had been doing this long enough to know what it felt like when a place was empty.

Still, it didn’t pay to be sloppy; that was how otherwise good agents wound up dead. So Bucky listened to his and Mbondu’s handler, Agent Merritt, as she advised him to advance cautiously, not taking anything for granted.

“Spotted the door,” he told them. “Should take me into the main storage room. I’m going.”

“Acknowledged." Merritt’s voice was professional, but it bore an edge. She had been getting crankier the longer the op went on, and Bucky couldn’t blame her: this was the third place they had looked for their asshole of a target this week, and the other two warehouses had been just as empty.

Bucky tried the doorknob one-handed, just in case, and couldn’t hold back a noise of disgust as it opened under a single turn.

“Barnes?" Merritt’s voice got a lot sharper.

“Not a problem,” he said, sweeping the huge, empty room on the other side of the door with his gun. “Just the damn door wasn’t even locked, that’s all—sloppy assholes. There’s nothing here, Mer. I clock two... three crates in the whole damn place, and one of those is barely big enough to hold a cat.”

“Yeah, well, go find out if our Schrodinger has been pulling any shenanigans anyway, would you?”

Mbondu snorted, and when she spoke her Oxford accent was distinctive over the comm. “Physics jokes, Merritt?”

“I thought it was a philosophy joke,” Merritt said with amusement.

Bucky worked his way around the room, staying vigilant as he reached the first crate. “Papers,” he reported, prying it open.

“I’ll forward it to the geek squad anyway,” Merritt sighed. “Next one?”

If Bucky were calling it, he would have said it would be the third crate—the one in the center of the room—that would get him. But it was the second crate, the small one that didn’t look big enough to hold much of anything, that held the trap. When he opened it, a lightning-bug glow flashed before his eyes, swirling around the crate like... Well, actually, it reminded him of a speak-and-say, one of those educational toys for little kids where you pulled the string and the little device whirled around...

 _Because I pulled the string,_ he realized. _The crate was boobie-trapped, and opening it pulled the... whatever this is..._

That was all he had time to think before the light flared, the ground vanished, and he was falling, falling, into a sky full of first stars and then clouds, and then there was ground beneath him, rushing up, closer, closer—

He shut his eyes, bracing for the impact—

 

* * *

  **May, 1943:**

* * *

 

When he hit, it wasn’t on the ground, and he wasn’t moving nearly as fast as he had been expecting. The drop was more like five feet than five hundred, and he landed face-down on a large wooden desk.

For a moment, he was too stunned to move. His arms were spread to either side, his gun still gripped too-tightly his right hand; his chin had hit the wood, and stars were springing up in his eyes. He was lucky he hadn’t bit right through his damn _tongue._ His hips, knees and dick were all singing arias of pain, and his feet dangled over the far end of the desk. (It was that or a sacrificial altar, because _what else was that size?_ But there was a map of Europe under his cheek, which did seem like a clue.)

His gun was ripped from his hand; he scrabbled upward, but by the time he even had his chin up, the gun was already nuzzling up to his neck.

“Shit,” he said. He went cross-eyed looking down towards where the muzzle would be, but the angle was bad. He cautiously lowered himself back down to the desk and raised his hands over his head.

“Oh, well done.” The voice behind him was crisp and feminine, the accent straight Received Pronounciation. “Now, I’m going to keep pointing this _lovely_ weapon at you, and you’re going to get off my desk, move into the center of the tent, and get to your knees, with your hands on your head.”

“Sure thing,” Bucky said, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been trained in what to do in this situation, so he immediately started trying to look cooperative and non-threatening, hunching his shoulders and keeping his voice meek. “I’m gonna push to my knees on the desk first, then slide down. And I’m gonna need to look around, briefly, to figure out which way is the center of the tent—I didn’t exactly get a good look on my way in.”

“Very well.” There was a small squeaking noise, the sound of leather on metal; apparently, his captor was wearing either gloves or a leather jacket. “Now move.”

Bucky did exactly what he had said he would do, getting to his hands and knees with his head tilted down toward the desk—the maps appeared to show troop movements across the continent, which was weird as hell since the whole of Europe hadn’t been involved in anything together for... decades, it must have been—and... was that the _HYDRA_ logo?

No time to study it, though. He slid his body over the side of the desk and stood, taking his permitted glance around the tent and—

He froze, staring at his captor. He was aware that he was gaping, and honestly this was why he was never going to get higher than a level six clearance, but _seriously._ “Anybody ever tell you you’re a _dead ringer_ for Peggy Carter?”

The woman's eyes narrowed to slits, her fingers tightening alarmingly on the gun. “Get. On. The. Floor!”

 

* * *

 

About the time she called for the Brass, Bucky figured he was probably in serious trouble. Then _Howard Fucking Stark_ walked in, next to _Colonel Chester “God Himself” Phillips,_ and Bucky knew it for a fact.

He relaxed back into a resigned sort of kneel, letting his elbows fall from their strict attention, until his hands were all but hanging from his hair. “So,” he said once he had told them his name and title, “I don’t suppose you folks know anything at all about time travel?”

“Oh, sure,” Howard Stark said casually. Bucky was... _pretty_ sure that was a lie. Like, ninety percent. “I don’t suppose there’s anything _you_ can say to convince us that’s what’s going on here?”

Colonel Phillips, behind Stark, raised an unimpressed set of eyebrows.

“That depends,” Bucky answered, thinking quickly. “I was never that great in history, but... what year is it?"

Director Carter—who was probably _Agent_ Carter, still—rolled her eyes as Stark answered, with a probably forgivable level of sarcasm, “It’s 1943. Does that help you any?”

Bucky breathed out a sigh of relief. “Yeah, it does,” he said, looking Stark straight in the eye, “because I know what the Manhattan Project is.”

Stark blinked, and then blanched. “Well,” he said breathlessly, “if you _are_ a Hydra spy, we’re all in a lot of trouble, then.”

“Yeah, well, lucky for you I’m not—plus we’re too far away from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos for me to do much good to Hydra if I were. Those locations haven’t been declassified yet, right? Hey, did you guys do Rebirth yet?”

“Yes.” And Phillips looked _pissed_ about it.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “I’m thinking that one hasn’t come through for you completely, yet."

“As complete as it can be, considering Erskine is dead,” Phillips growled.

“Could it be a case of alternate realities?” Stark suggested, jumping on what was obviously a conversational grenade. “There’s a theory that small events can alter the future—”

“Well, I don’t know about the future _he_ come from," said Phillips, "but in this present right here, we got one damn soldier, and not even a good one, at that.”

“It’s not that,” Bucky broke in. “I, uh—I’m really _not_ that great at all the history stuff, but I remember there were two parts to that project, and they _were_ kind of, uh... broken up in time. So you’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop.” It wasn’t the most convincing phrasing he had ever used, but he was afraid to spell it out any more than that. He knew that Captain America had been a publicity stunt who turned into a real soldier after a daring rescue, although he couldn’t have put a date on that rescue. But not only was his knowledge of Captain America too general or too far in the future to be useful as proof—if he told the Phillips about the rescue, the Captain might be pulled sooner, putting him out of position to even attempt it in the first place.

The three founders of SHIELD—all of whom Bucky was _in! A room with!!!—_ exchanged glances with each other, Phillips in particular looking extremely thoughtful.

“Is it a shoe that’s likely to shoot people?” Carter asked carefully. “You had better say, if it is. That was how we lost Erskine, and I’d prefer that it not happen again.”

Bucky tried to think about what he knew about Captain America—embarrassingly little, at least that he knew for certain; mostly it was propaganda and old cartoons—and tipped his head back and forth, his hands dragging along on top of it. “It’s... something that’s not likely to shoot the good guys?” he offered. “Guys from HYDRA, _they_ kinda get shot." He remembered the still photograph someone had taken of the gaping crater where one of the HYDRA factories had once been. “A _lot.”_

Carter and Stark exchanged grim smiles. “Good,” said Phillips gruffly. “Anything else?”

“That will prove I’m from the future? Sure, I’ve got my earpiece in—although, without anyone broadcasting, it’ll just seem like a regular ear plug to you. There is the part where I _fell out of the sky,_ though, that seems hard to fake.” The pause he inserted there was long and pointed, and the two men did seem to catch it, shifting from side to side awkwardly. “And there is one more thing—although I’m not sure you would accept it as _proof,_ exactly...”

“Try,” ordered Carter. She hefted Bucky’s gun like she was going to be disappointed not to use it.

“I’ll have to take my hands off my head,” Bucky warned her. When no one stopped him, he suited action to word, reaching his left hand back into the rear pocket of his black tac pants. It opened with velcro, and all of them flinched at the sound, himself included. He pulled out his wallet, flipping it open to his badge, and tossed it at Phillips’ feet.

“Strategic Homeland Inter— _what is this?”_

“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division,” Bucky filled in helpfully, then pulled a sympathetic face. “I know, you’ve never heard of it. Right?"

They nodded.

So did he. “That’s because it doesn’t exist yet." Trying not to let too much of his inner fanboying show, he went on, “Wanna guess who founded SHIELD?”

The two men looked blank; on the other side of Bucky’s field of vision, Carter’s eyes went wide, then narrowed, obviously adding the question to the fact that he had recognized her on sight, and drawing an at least mostly correct conclusion. “Really...” she said. It wasn’t quite a question. “I’m intrigued; which one of them was it?" The words came out like a trap. The gun muzzle drifted slightly up and off to the side.

Stark did a double-take. “Wait—one of _us?"_ He pointed back and forth between himself and Phillips.

Bucky shrugged, figuring that he had gotten about as close to revealing the future as he should really come. Butterflies, right. And hurricanes. “I know it doesn’t confirm anything, because it hasn’t happened yet. Still, I figured you’d take some comfort from seeing it." He held out his hand, acting more confident than he really felt. “I'll need that badge back now.”

Phillips was visibly reluctant to hand it back over. “What if I said I wanted Stark to take a further look at this?"

It was an understandable request; the holographic inlays and digital chip in the ID would be fascinating to Stark, as well as confirming even further his origin in the future. But... Bucky looked up at Phillips directly.

Bucky didn’t really _do_ deception; or at least, not very well—which was one reason why he seldom bothered with it. It was probably why Carter, Phillips and Stark were listening to him. They were too good to not know he was telling the truth. He _was_ excellent at investigation, but not because he tricked people into revealing anything; instead, he used empathy, forthright facts, and honest vulnerability to gain trust and allies. “I need it back, sir,” he repeated. “It’s all I’ve got left, right now. I’m apparently stuck in the past, in case you missed it—in a time, more specifically, when a genocidal dictator wants me and everyone I love dead. Only thing I’ve got left in all that is my identity, sir. I have _got_ to remain an Agent of SHIELD.”

The tent was silent for a minute—Bucky could hear distant shouts and automotive noises from the camp—camp?—outside. Finally, Colonel Phillips tossed him back the badge. “Get this man a uniform,” he ordered Director Carter brusquely. “He doesn’t exactly blend in wearing that... getup. Whatever it is.” SHIELD-issue tactical garb with bulletproof vest, thanks. “And for God’s sake, someone make him up some papers!”

Bucky stiffened. “Sir?”

Phillips glared. “You’re not _window dressing,_ son; we don’t have time for that. If what you say is true, we don’t have the first clue how to send you back. And we can’t exactly have you running around loose with a head full of classified intel—but if we’ve got to keep you, then at least you are, by God, going to be useful.”

 

* * *

 

“He didn’t ask if we won the war,” Stark commented as he steered Bucky back against the vertical pole in the center of the tent. He passed behind him and started marking off the heights of Bucky’s head, shoulders, waist, and inseam.

“He didn’t need to.” Carter spoke as Bucky shifted, wriggling his toes uncomfortably in the chill air of Stark’s tent. He wished he could put his shoes back on. “We were speaking English.”

“Well, I guess that’s one way to look at it." Stark tapped Bucky’s shoulder. “Alright, shirt off.”

Bucky froze. Director Carter, leaning against the wall, raised one shapely eyebrow, making no indications of leaving despite his impending nudity.

“What?” Bucky breathed.

“You heard me. I can’t measure your arm length if I can’t see your arms, Barnes.”

“It’s just..." Bucky looked from Carter to Stark, and then back down at his arm. The reality of his situation slowly dawned on him. He had forgotten he even had a soulmark until this instant, much less what the damn thing _said._ Implications tripped over suggestions in his head, and Bucky felt himself go white. “Oh god, I just realized how much _worse_ this is. I—" He turned to look pleadingly at Director Carter, but she was obviously unsympathetic to his predicament. “Shit, this is gonna be _impossible._ Fuck!”

“Language,” Stark said irritably. “What's the problem, kid? Never say you’re shy around the ladies!”

In answer, Bucky pulled off his tac vest, and then his shirt, holding out his arm so they could both read the soulmark on his wrist. He slouched against the tent pole, resigned. “Believe it or not, I really did just now think of this. It wasn’t exactly my highest priority before now...”

 _Who’s that with Peggy?_ asked Bucky’s soulmark, in sharp, easily legible handwriting. It was a masculine hand, which wasn’t a surprise given Bucky’s preferences, from an “organized yet artistic mind” according to the handwriting expert at SHIELD. (Kevin was very good at what he did, and could work from very small samples. That, combined with the fact that you could buy his services with a bottle of Laphroaig, meant that pretty much every agent who _had_ a soulmark had asked Kevin to have a look at it.)

It was the first thought his soulmate would think on meeting him, and here he was, signing up to be hanging out with someone named _Peggy_ for the foreseeable future. And worse than that—the ‘foreseeable future’ was all decades in Bucky’s past. He was either stuck here or doomed to the worst kind of heartbreak, and he wasn’t sure which was worse.

Carter and Stark both leaned in to read it, then went very still.

Carter raised an eyebrow like she was asking Stark to confirm something, but Stark screwed his face up noncommittally. They turned back to Bucky, neither saying anything.

Bucky cleared his throat, looking at the ground. “Funny thing is,” he said, “in my time Peggy isn't even a common name. It's... out of fashion. Mostly belongs to older women. At least middle-aged.”

“Flattering,” Peggy said—impossible to think of her as Carter now, not with her name carved into his skin.

Bucky shrugged dismissively. “Just one of those things,” he said. “Names go in and out of fashion all the time. Dolores... Evelyn... Hell, Jennifer!”

“Who names their child _Jennifer?”_ asked Stark.

“Just about everybody, thirty years from now.”  

Stark and Peggy exchanged another glance. Peggy reached down to trace one long finger over the dark writing on Bucky’s upturned wrist, her face masklike. She shrugged. “It changes nothing,” she informed them both. Her tone was more certain now, as if he had confirmed something by having her name on his arm. “I’ll have an identity drawn up for you, Barnes. Everything the SSR does is confidential, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t use your own name—we’ll invent a history for you. Where are you from?”

“Brooklyn,” Bucky answered. Stark seemed to abruptly remember he was supposed to be measuring something and started applying his tape. “I’m a certified sniper, too—through SHIELD, and also I got bronze at the Olympics. Don’t know if that’ll factor in for you or not.”

“It’s useful information to know." Peggy’s smile was red as blood as she hefted Bucky’s P-90 in the air. “I’m keeping this.”

Of course she was.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

**November, 1943:**

* * *

 

Bucky had fifteen hours before he had to somehow merge his way seamlessly into a regiment, and he intended to spend four of those hours asleep—a resolve that lasted right up until the instant he saw the sign for the stage show.

He was in the SSR command tent when he saw it, sitting on a crate of experimental weaponry—because really, all he had ever wanted in life was to someday be able tell his grandchildren about how he got a buttock blown off in the war. From time to time he would tap the sides of his feet against each other as he waited for Peggy to finish her correspondence. Since her correspondence was from all over the continent and in code—and not always the same code, either—it was taking a while. Bucky was Peggy’s secretary, officially speaking, so in theory it should have been his job to respond to her letters in her stead, but he also wasn't authorized to know any of the ciphers required. Instead, they had all agreed, “secretary” was a polite euphemism in his case, and what he actually did was watch her back on her missions. That worked out pretty well for them; Bucky was a crack shot and a friendly face, and more than once he’d gotten the intel just by being good at languages.

But it _did_ mean that when they were in camp, Bucky was stuck sitting around, fending off the well-intentioned advances of a hundred bushy-tailed young officers on Peggy's behalf and leaving her the breathing room she needed to do her job. Fortunately, his mere presence (clean, neatly trimmed, and handsome in a uniform if he did say so himself) was enough to do the trick, and he was able to put up his feet, relax, and contemplate dragging out his favorite specialized skill: the ability to take a nap with his eyes open.

Just as he was about to begin the arduous work of drowsing, he caught sight of the poster someone was hanging on the other side of the tent. His feet slipped off their crate in a hurry and he found himself standing upright without ever noticing the process of getting there. “Oh my God,” he breathed, staring at it. “Does that say ‘Captain America’?!”

Peggy looked up, followed the direction of his gaze, blinked, and then smiled. “It does, darling. Why, did you want to meet him?”

Bucky bit back the first half-dozen replies that sprang to mind and just nodded, frantically.

Peggy pursed her lips, setting her letter down and folding her hands together. “Well,” she said eventually, “the show’s coming here in a week, but you’ll be gone by then. But I believe you have enough time before your assignment to go see him tonight. The show is playing in Mirapella, only a couple hours from here.”

Bucky whined, completely without meaning to. “I know you have to finish your stuff—” he began, but Peggy just shook her head.

“You drive,” she ordered, her voice rich with amusement. “I’ll read in the car.”

 

* * *

 

The show played on a wooden stage to a yard full of indifferent men, laughing and joking over the lines. There was popcorn available, mostly stale, and it got everywhere. underfoot, in the air... Bucky even found a piece down the back of his collar. The girls were pretty, but gone too soon, and even Captain America’s impressive weight-lifting got old after the first three minutes.

Bucky didn’t care. His grin wrapped itself all around his face, and he couldn’t stop bouncing on his toes. Peggy, who giggled in all the wrong places (strongly suggesting she knew some things about the Captain that nobody else did), swatted him to keep him still.

“I take it you enjoyed yourself,” she said as they were walking around the camp after the show, heading back towards their Jeep.

“It was awful!” Bucky burbled. “That was the _worst!_ God, if people in my time only knew how _corny_ Cap was!”

“You seem awfully delighted for someone who found it corny, darling. No, this way—" She took his arm and steered him away from the cars, towards a strange structure that Bucky realized belatedly was the rear portion of the stage.

“No,” he breathed. “Really? Peggy, please say you mean it—”

She laughed outright at him now, taking his arm proprietarily and marching forward as if checkpoints were a thing that only happened to other people. “You seemed to be a fan,” she explained, tugging him up the steps. “And you have been _such_ a help to us.” She patted his arm. “This way.”

And then they were squeezing through dancers in too-short skirts and coming around the corner, until suddenly Captain America was in front of them.

For one second, Bucky absolutely couldn’t breathe.

The Captain was taking off his stupid-looking helmet when he and Peggy came around the corner, fitting it onto its stand with a tiny frown on his face. When he saw the two of them, the frown deepened for a second, then cleared, smoothed away and covered with a false-hope sort of expression that twisted something in Bucky’s gut.

“Peggy!” said Captain America. His voice was a pleasant baritone that shivered down Bucky’s spine, a faint hint of accent sending Bucky’s heart right back home. “What are you doing here?”

“Bucky wanted to come backstage,” she said disingenuously. “He’s a big fan. And we weren’t far.”

Well, it wasn’t _not_ true...

Captain America’s smile was an absurd thing, all sunshine and hope. Either he was as dumb as he was pretty—unlikely, given the things the man was going to accomplish—or he knew Peggy was lying about something, knew it wasn’t just that Bucky was a fan, and had leapt to the understandable-but-(probably)-wrong conclusion that they were really here because _Peggy_ wanted to be.

Captain America apparently liked that idea. Because he liked Peggy—and respected her, too; it was all right there in his face. Bucky thought about the kind of man who could genuinely look like _that_ for a woman like Peggy _in the 1940’s_ and melted a little. His hero-worship vanished, and he found himself abruptly liking the Captain for who he was, instead of who he had the potential to be.

“I am!” Bucky blurted. “A fan, I mean. But also, I just—when else am I gonna get a chance to tell my grandkids I met Captain America?”

The Captain laughed awkwardly. “Well... tomorrow?” he suggested. “Or anytime, really. I do this show a lot." His smile was painful, the smile of a man putting a good face on a bad situation.

Bucky surprised all of them by grinning like a loon. “Oh, do you?” he asked. “Wow. That’s definitely what you’re most well-known for, too.” He only barely managed to keep it from sounding as sarcastic as it was. Peggy narrowed her eyes at him and gave a little nod, as if he had confirmed something for her; the Captain just looked politely confused.

“Excuse me,” Peggy said, “I suddenly need to check something, somewhere else.” She pushed Bucky into Captain America’s chair, leaving the Captain himself to perch on the dressing table’s surface. “Converse, would you, darlings?”

The two men blinked at each other, stunned by the abrupt turn of events.

“Uh... Peggy?" Bucky trusted her with his life, of course, but she did seem to have some scheme going that she hadn’t let him in on.

“Hold on— _Peggy?"_

That she hadn’t let _either of them_ in on.

She actually wiggled her fingers at them as she ducked around the corner.

There was a discomfited silence between them once she was gone. Bucky broke it by leaning back in the Captain’s chair and snorting, “Rude.”

Captain America looked even _more_ awkward in response. “I think she was trying to give you time alone with me,” he explained. “Since you’re a fan.”

“I know she was. But it was still rude to you.”

“Oh.” Captain America looked disconcerted, surprised that Bucky would consider him in his evaluation of the situation.

“Hey—" Bucky jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You wanna get out of here? It’s awfully noisy." The showgirls were a swirling scrum of babble just around the corner. “There’s gotta be somewhere we could talk more comfortably." Bucky felt a little odd even saying it, aware that it sounded vaguely like a come-on.

“Oh. Sure!" The Captain looked startled enough that Bucky gave him a fifty-fifty shot of having ID’ed the double-entendre, but whatever. If it came right down to it and the guy actually took it that way, it wasn’t like Bucky was going to say no.

Not to _Captain America._

And besides... the guy seemed cool.

 

* * *

 

They ended up walking out towards the camp’s showers, sitting atop a tall pile of crates and watching the men come and go. “So,” the Captain asked, “how do you know Peggy?”

“It's a funny story,” Bucky said, stalling for time before abruptly deciding—fuck it. If he couldn't trust _Captain America,_ then who _could_ he trust. “Yeah... yeah, it's a hilarious story, actually. So there I was, working my way through a warehouse we suspected was full of contraband, when I pop open a crate with some kind futuristic device in it, spring a booby trap, and find myself catapulted umpteen years into the past. I landed sprawled across Peggy’s desk. Totally undignified.”

Captain America laughed. “Well, it's original at least,” he said, crossing his arms and raising his eyebrows.

“I'm not joking,” Bucky said. “I’m also stuck— no way of getting back home again. I convinced Peggy and the S.S.R. to let me help out, so...”

Slowly, the smile dripped off of the Captain’s face like pancake batter off of a spoon. “Well, you do seem persuasive,” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t even be thinking about believing this, and yet... I don’t know. You strike me as honest." He smiled, a crooked, puzzled sort of thing. Bucky found himself much more warmed by it than he would have expected, and flushed. He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck to cover it.

“That, uh— that’s why I’m such a big fan. I’ve always wanted to meet you. I know this probably seems..." He let his voice trail off and raised a hand, waggling it from side to side in a nonverbal gesture meaning _batfuck crazy._

Captain America nodded fervently.

“Yeah, okay, and that sucks. But in the future, you’re gonna be... I mean, I can’t even tell you most of it, because I’ve heard messing with the timeline is, you know, _bad,_ but... I can tell you this: you’re gonna mean a hell of a lot to a hell of a lot of people. And I’m one of ‘em.”

 _“Why,_ though?” the Captain burst out. “Why would you even _care_ about a guy like me? There are so many men making much bigger differences—hell, there are millions of men not stuck here in _tights!”_

Bucky grinned brightly. “You should always wear tights, they look _smashing."_

“Shut up.” But the Captain had a slow, reluctant grin beginning to pull at his mouth, so Bucky was considering that a win.

“There’s a fine tradition of men in tights saving the day,” Bucky assured him with false earnestness. “Superman, Batman... Peter Pan...”

“Shut _up!"_ Captain America kicked out and bumped Bucky’s crate, lightly—not enough to dislodge him off his pile—and Bucky grinned in triumph, settling into a marginally more comfortable position on his stack.

“Technically, I’m pretty sure the Barber of Seville did it, too,” he pointed out. “Seriously, though—hey, you want a secret from the future?”

Instantly, he had Cap’s full attention again. He shifted nervously on his crate.

“All those thing Captain America did... The things _you_ did—do— _are doing,_ like punching out Hitler?"

“That stuff’s not _real,_ though,” Cap protested. “Hitler’s played by an _actor—_ and that’s all I am.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s real,” Bucky insisted, refusing to be distracted, “because that’s not my point, here. What _matters_ is that _I believed_ you did it. Like, as a kid—when I was twenty, I mean. I’d just graduated college, and I’d qualified for the Olympics in shooting, and SHI—the Division, I mean, the people I work for, they came to me and asked if I wanted to serve my country." Bucky thought it was probably a bad idea to tell Cap there was an entire organization named after his primary weapon when Cap wasn’t even _using_ the damn thing yet.

“And I thought about _you—_ and, okay, some other people, too, but mostly about you. Back when I was _really_ a kid—like, when I was little—I had actually wanted to _be_ you, and then the job offer... It was as close as I was ever gonna get. To being that kind of a hero.

“So you’re the reason I joined, uh, the Division. You’re the reason I knew how much it meant to help people, you’re the reason I wanted to be _that kind_ of a _good person._  I can’t even tell you how much you mean—to the world, and to _me._ I—I’m probably not supposed to tell you this—or any of this, I guess—but meeting you? It’s the greatest honor of my life. And the circular part is, I wouldn’t even get to _do that_ if it weren’t for you, either!”

Bucky spread his hands wide and waited.

Captain America had gone very, very still. His mouth was open, not a lot but enough, and he wasn’t blinking. His eyes were fixed on nothing, midair, and then, like a slowly cracking glacier, he shuddered all over.

Bucky frowned. “Uh... Cap?”

“Bucky,” Cap answered. “It was Bucky, right?”

“Yes...?”

“Nice to meet you, Bucky; I’m Steve, Steve Rogers.”

“Uh. Uh-huh. Holy wow...” Bucky was staring again, because that name had definitely _never_ been declassified. “...Hi?”

“Hi. May I see your arm?”

“My—”

And then Bucky remembered what was on his arm. His eyes widened, and he pulled at his sleeve futilely. He knew how far up his arm the writing went—about two-thirds of the way to the elbow—and the sleeve just _wouldn’t_ pull back far enough no matter how he tugged—

He stripped his jacket off entirely, exasperated. “Here,” he said, shoving his arm across the gap between them like he was offering a script to a pharmacist. Below them—they were still sitting on crates, on either side of narrow aisle, each of them eight feet in the air—below them, a private walked through, glancing up at them curiously as they formed a bridge over his head.

There was nothing wrong with what they were doing. Not with just showing a soulmark to a pal. There _wasn’t._

Captain America’s—Steve’s, Bucky reminded himself, looking at the man who might or might not be his _soulmate,_ fucking _hell!—Steve’s_ goddamned _hands_ were shaking as he carefully slipped the button through Bucky’s sleeve, rolling back the cuff smoothly, so it didn’t wrinkle. It took four rolls to get the cuff far enough up his arm, but Steve—and Bucky—knew after just the first. The handwriting, Bucky supposed; that was what would have given it away to Steve.

Bucky got it from the widening of Steve’s eyes, and the way his face went white.

Steve’s hands paused on the top roll. He read the words there, the bold, confident hand that _had_ to be familiar, and licked his lips. Then he carefully, so gently, began rolling Bucky’s sleeve back down again. Bucky said nothing as Steve smoothed the fabric, re-buttoned up the cuff. Couldn’t find words to speak as Steve lowered his arm and then released it.

Fumblingly, Steve reached for his own sleeve.

“Don’t,” Bucky cut in.

Steve froze, looking up.

“Not here, I mean.” Bucky looked around at the camp, but of course there weren’t too many places which were actually private. “If that is what I think it is, we’ll probably want... I don’t suppose you have a _room?"_

Steve’s eyes went round again, his jaw dropping. He blushed brilliantly from the tips of his ears to somewhere well below his collar.

“I meant to _talk,”_ Bucky clarified in a hurry. “I meant to—oh, God..." It was probably possible to fall off his pile of crates, he thought desperately, burying his head in his palms. Just rock from side to side until the whole stack went over—

Steve hunched his head up like a turtle and he wasn’t getting any less red, but he did nod. “I, uh... I do have a room, actually. I mean, me and Mike share, but Mike’s never really around, so...”

Bucky threw his jacket over his shoulders, buttoning it up and settling it into place with a little shimmy. Even all covered up again, his wrist was still burning from the chill of the evening air, and from the heat of Steve’s gaze on his words. Bucky pretended not to feel it as he gestured broadly towards the expanse of ground around them.

“After you.”

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t that Bucky wasn’t thrilled to meet his soulmate; he _was._ He’d been waiting for this day from the time he realized he was one of the five percent of the population who _had_ a soulmate. And to have met his soulmate as young as he was, and to have known who his soulmate was so immediately... Most people didn’t get that.

The words of a soulmark were the first thought you had when you met your soulmate, but the articulateness varied wildly, and so for that matter did the definition of _met._ There were “some enchanted evening”-style meets where the soulmates exchanged glances across the room, and “finally getting to know you after fifteen years of riding the same bus”-style meets, and of the two, the second one was usually easier to identify. After all, unless you had particularly bad impulse control, it wasn’t like you spoke your first thoughts out loud.

And that was the other thing. Bucky wasn’t even sure what it said on Steve’s wrist; he didn’t remember what he’d been thinking when they met, other than the certainty that it must contain a lot of exclamation points. So, there went his dignity, he guessed; oh well, because to be honest, Bucky’d never been all that dignified anyway.

But none of that was the _problem._

The _problem_ was that even a shitty history student like Bucky Barnes knew that Captain America _died_ at the end of the war, and Bucky still didn’t know if it was possible to change that.

He wasn’t even sure how he _would_ change it, if he could. Taking down the _Valkyrie_ had saved literally millions of lives, including Bucky’s own grandparents and great-grandparents. (And a score or so of uncles. There were a lot of Barneses.) And no one else had been on that plane with Cap except for the Red Skull, the history books were clear about that.

It was about the only part of the affair the history books _were_ clear about; who else had been at the HYDRA compound, on either side; who had witnessed Captain America’s death, if anybody; even the location of the HYDRA base itself was shrouded in mystery. Classified, confidential... There had been half a dozen movies about Cap, of varying levels of quality, and they had all made up the details; no two agreed on basically anything.

Still, there was that one detail they all got right. Cap had been alone on the plane... If Bucky could just sneak on _with_ him, maybe he could figure out a way to get them to safety!

For the first time since he found himself ass-up on Peggy Carter’s desk, Bucky didn’t give two shits about being stuck in the past. He wasn’t thinking about whether Stark would manage to figure out time travel after all, or whether Merritt and Mbondu would talk someone at SHIELD into figuring it out on the other end. He didn’t care anymore; he didn’t _want_ them to.

He just needed to stay in this time long enough to save Steve. And then when he went, he could take Steve with him.

 

* * *

 

The mysterious “Mike” was in fact gone by the time they got to Steve’s room. There were barracks, here, with the enlisted men in bunked dorms and the officers in doubles rooms. Steve was technically enlisted, but as there were only two men in the USO tour, it made no sense to put the two of them in their own dorm—and they certainly weren’t going to room the men in with the showgirls.

Anyway, the upshot was that Steve got walls.

Bucky found himself swallowing to moisten a dry throat as Steve closed the door—so, so quietly—behind them.

The room was small, almost claustrophobic. There were two beds like a college dorm, a shared pair of desks centered between them as a remnant of the room's original purpose as an officer’s quarters, and one dresser, presumably with joint custody of the drawers. The whole arrangement was cramped, all but forcing Steve and Bucky to stand in each other’s space. Steve looked wild for a second, then pulled out the further of the two desk chairs. “Would you—that is, have a seat. Please!"

Bucky’s knees were feeling pretty rubbery by now, so he sort of thought it might be a good idea. He moved towards the chair and then stopped, pivoting to look back at Steve again. “Can I see your arm?” he blurted. “First. I mean..." He shrugged, embarrassed, but sure as hell not going to back down once he’d said it. “...I’d really like to _know.”_

Steve nodded, and then nodded again. And again. Nice to know Bucky wasn’t the only nervous one.

“I—here.” Steve started stripping off his—costume, Jesus, it was a fucking _costume._ Not even a uniform, yet; it crumpled like cotton. It also came off in one piece, or at least the top of it did, anyway.

There was suddenly a lot of very bare, very golden skin on display.

Bucky felt a sort of keening whine building up in his throat. He tried to keep it in, but it leaked out around the edges, anyway.

Steve turned brilliantly red again in response. The blush, Bucky couldn’t help but notice, did in fact go most of the way down his chest.

“I’m sorry; it’s the costume, it’s—I can’t rip them anymore, they got really mad about it—back when I first started, I was still adjusting to the strength, after...”

“After Rebirth,” Bucky filled in for him. The project name had been declassified way back in the seventies, and all the cartoons had used it. “Sure.”

Steve paused, half out of his costume, blinking.

“I’m from the _future,”_ Bucky reminded him.

“...Right,” Steve said. He shook his head and finished pulling his arm out of the sleeve. “Here,” he said, offering Bucky his wrist.

Bucky felt the charge in the air as he took it, the tension as he stepped closer, now mere inches from Steve’s naked chest. Steve was in high-waisted hotpants and still one of the sexiest men Bucky had ever seen.

 _And he’s Captain America!_ shrieked the fourteen-year-old-girl part of Bucky’s mind. But Bucky pushed that down firmly. He wasn’t going to be thinking of that.

Steve was, very definitely, Bucky’s soulmate, though, no matter what else he was or wasn’t. The familiar handwriting crabbing its way across Steve’s wrist proved that. The words were written very small, like a whisper, sneaking across his arm instead of striding boldly along it like Bucky’s mark did; it would have fit under a not terribly wide bracelet, and it wasn’t a short thought:

 _Holy shit, I get to actually_ _meet_ _him? I’ve wanted this my whole life!_

“Meet” was underlined twice. The H and the I’s were spiky with excitement.

Bucky reached up a hand to touch, the same way Steve had to him, and now it was obvious why. There was something about it, something about seeing your own thoughts—no matter how embarrassing—and your own handwriting etched into another person’s skin, that made you want to check that it was real. It seemed magical—and, since scientists were still baffled, might actually have _been_ magical for all Bucky knew—and the first instinct was always going to be to investigate. To make sure it was really there. To touch.

“Oh my God,” Bucky breathed out, shaky. His fingertips tingled when they touched Steve’s wrist, and he repeated himself, this time louder. “Oh, my God!"

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “I.”

There might have been more to that sentence, but Steve didn’t voice it. His eyes were fixed where Bucky’s fingers rested against his skin. Bucky waited for him to finish speaking, tapping with his index finger against Steve’s skin, but although Steve’s mouth had dropped open, no words emerged.

Bucky felt stupid, dreamy; like his mind was all full of molasses or honey. He could have stood there for seconds or years before he realized that the reason Steve wasn’t saying anything was because Bucky was _tapping his finger against Steve’s soulmark._

He forced himself to still. Tried to force himself to take his hand away, too, but he couldn’t, quite. So instead he just asked, “You... what?”

Steve swallowed, flicking his glassy eyes away from where they still touched, gaze darting around the too-small room instead. “Uh...”

Bucky frowned. “You were saying,” he prompted. “You...?”

“Forget,” Steve said roughly, a hint of a groan in the word. “No, wait. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, don’t let go. Please. I remember. I was saying... I thought I would be older. Than you. That I wouldn’t meet you until middle age, because how else would you have heard of me early enough to have...”

He didn’t finish the thought, but Bucky caught the gist, anyway. “Were you worried about being too old?" He felt the teasing smile bloom across his face and didn’t even try to stop it.

“That, or not aging. Erskine said—hnnn!”

Bucky found he was stroking Steve’s arm again. “Time travel,” Bucky said, piecing the words together one by one. He was having a hard time thinking. His fingers tingled as he traced his words on Steve’s wrist over and over. “It’s... It’s not the first thing... you know.”

 _“Yeah,”_ Steve agreed, much more fervently than the half-formed thought really called for.

Bucky remembered how careful Steve had been when releasing Bucky’s arm, fifteen minutes ago when they had been perched on those storage containers. He understood that, too, now; it was hard to make himself release Steve, hard to pull back...

...and, even having done it, even having let Steve’s arm fall away from him, Bucky was still face-to-face with his soulmate, and his soulmate had eyes full of emotion and no shirt on his _massive, pillowy chest._

It was too much. Bucky groaned and leaned in, dragging his left hand—and his soulmark, now covered again by his shirt—over Steve’s cheek, wrapping his fingers around the back of Steve’s neck, letting his right hand come up under Steve’s ribs, wrapping around him and pressing him in against Bucky’s front.

Their lips met and immediately parted again, ripped apart. Steve had tripped over Bucky’s legs and was falling, Bucky had overbalanced and was going with him—and then Steve wrenched himself backwards, pivoting and carrying Bucky with him, and a second later they were tumbling into the bed together, rolling only half a turn on the narrow mattress so that Bucky was on top.

Steve blushed. Bucky laughed.

It was a good laugh, gentle, rising up in him like a sunbeam, coming out at the corners of his eyes and creasing up his dimples. “Hey, Steve,” Bucky said, snickering, knowing how terrible it was going to be but unable to keep himself from saying it, “I think I’m falling for you!”

Steve blinked twice, then shoved playfully at Bucky’s chest. “I changed my mind,” he announced, giggling, “I’m turning you in, I want a different soulmate.”

Bucky only laughed harder, muffling his giggles against the curve of Steve’s neck. Steve went still beneath him, his breath catching as Bucky pressed his face against his throat.

Eventually, Bucky’s giggles died off, and he was left with the rising-tide realization that he was pressed against his soulmate’s chest, in a bed, with his mouth against his neck... He went still, too.

For a second, neither of them moved.

Then—

Bucky propped himself up with hands on either side of Steve’s ribs, trying to see Steve’s face as he asked. He had to be sure...

“Can I kiss—”

_“Please!"_

Steve looked awkward, embarrassed at his own eagerness, but Bucky couldn’t help but be flattered. “Okay,” he whispered, brushing his lips against Steve’s jaw. “Okay."

He lingered there for a moment, enjoying the sweet hitches of Steve’s breath, the microscopic moans coaxed out of him with such a simple touch.

He tried to imagine what it must be like for Steve, what Steve would have expected versus what he got. Maybe Bucky being a guy wasn’t too unexpected—his handwriting wasn’t exactly feminine—but the being from the future thing, _that_ had to be throwing the guy. But Steve wasn’t exactly hesitating; he was, if anything, _too_ eager, like he didn’t know what to do with how much he wanted Bucky. It was pretty flattering, to say the least. _A good man,_ Bucky thought; that was how all the books and shows had described him, so frequently that Bucky was pretty sure they were quoting something. But what did that _mean._ Obviously not what the Moral Majority thought it meant...

Still, Bucky was pretty sure Steve had been “saving” himself for his soulmate, and it was becoming very quickly obvious that Steve was _desperately_ eager to stop saving, and get the payoff he had earned.

Bucky brushed his lips up, over Steve’s cheek. It was impossibly soft and smelled far too good, the faint perfume from the stage makeup underlying the muskiness of a man who has almost, but not quite, been sweating. The ridge of Steve’s cheekbone rose up beneath Bucky's mouth, and Bucky couldn’t resist drifting his lips over it, dropping a sweet kiss on its highest arc before trailing his mouth down and settling, finally, on Steve’s sweet, plush lips.

For a second they just breathed together, delirious heat spiralling with their panting. Bucky wondered, briefly, if Steve had ever been kissed before, and a second later was sure he had not been. His mouth was too soft beneath Bucky’s, his lips flaccid. But Bucky just murmured, “Like this,” and firmed his own lips, teasing Steve by dropping pecks on his lips and then pulling away, until Steve figured it out and met him in kind.

“More, please,” Steve begged as Bucky pulled away yet again, and Bucky grinned down at him sharply. He put his hands on either side of Steve’s face and held him still, nibbling at Steve’s lower lip teasingly until Steve bucked beneath him.

He was trying to keep it sweet, not too heavy. He wanted Steve’s first kiss to be good. Wanted it to be romantic, the kind of kiss you dream of when you’re a little kid and you get the soulmark in the first place. But Steve kept making these little _noises,_  tiny whimpers and whines of the kind that you didn’t even have to open your mouth to get out, animal sounds that came from his throat and sounded like desperation.

Bucky gave in, and groaned, and _tasted._ He went slowly at first, just the tiniest slip of his tongue along Steve’s lip. Then, as Steve gasped and opened, he pressed in more, deeper, a shy swipe of his tongue before pulling it back again. Bucky groaned again as sparklers went off in his mind, fireworks leaving him blind and deaf to anything that wasn’t _Steve, Steve, Steve._ His muscles tensed as he fought back the urge to grind down, but he couldn’t stop the sounds that came out of his chest.

The kiss went on and on, and Bucky melted into it, pressing close against Steve as Steve’s big hands tentatively swept down his back. At some point he tipped to the side, feeding his leg in between Steve’s so that they were pressed against each other from chest to knees. He stopped short of grinding—even though he wanted to, very badly. It was too soon, even for soulmates, even during a war. They barely knew each other, for crying out loud.

Instead, when they got to the point where they either had to stop or admit they were going to have sex, Bucky pulled back. “Hey,” he said softly, panting. “Steve. Look at me, for a second.”

Steve froze against him, and a flash of something—something not good, like fear or shame—crossed his face. “Sorry!”

Bucky blinked. “For what?” he asked.

Steve looked more miserable, not less, at the question. “For whatever I did that made you stop?” he said. It sounded like a guess. “I’m not... I don’t know how to.... He waved a hand vaguely downward toward where their bodies were pressed together. “...to do this.”

Bucky tilted his head to the side, feeling his bangs drift across his forehead. “However we want,” he said, answering the question Steve hadn’t quite asked. “It’s just us, right? But I’m not ready yet. It feels too soon.”

He thought about saying more, but didn't. Instead, he stopped talking, waiting to see what Steve would say.

What Steve _said_ was, “Oh.” He also blushed, brilliantly, from his hairline to halfway down his arms (and abs—Bucky was briefly distracted). He didn’t say anything else, though, and there was a hesitant sort of silence which filled the room for a while.

Eventually, Bucky shifted. “Is that how it feels to you?” he asked.

Steve turned his face away, hiding it in the thin mattress so that his voice came out muffled. “Feels too good to think about anything else,” he admitted, and Bucky grinned at the answer.

He patted Steve’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said comfortingly. “Sit up, slide me your smoke ration. We can talk?”

Steve turned his head just slightly so that one eye could peek up at Bucky. Bucky gave him a big grin, a beaming, gentle one, because he wanted Steve to know he wasn’t upset. “That sounds good,” Steve admitted, relaxing. “Really good. Can you stay long?”

Bucky shrugged, sitting up to give Steve room to move. He thought about crossing the room and grabbing Steve’s shirt off the desks in the center, but—feeling a little low, and a lot turned on, still—didn’t. “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “Until Peggy says we have to leave—I have a mission early tomorrow. But I’ll stay as long as I can.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with the depiction of torture. If you want to skip it, stop when Bucky gets taken to the room and start again next chapter.

They were talking about their respective moms by the time Peggy found them. She knocked and entered in the same breath, briskly evaluating the situation with a smirk and a lingering up and down look at Steve that Bucky stiffening indignantly. “Well! Congratulations to both of you, I suppose. We’re leaving in twenty minutes, Barnes; try to brush your hair at some point beforehand, would you? And you have greasepaint on your temple.”

Bucky hurriedly swiped his hand over his forehead where he had rubbed it against Steve’s face and looked down, but his hand was clean. By the time he looked up again, Peggy was gone, the door still swinging closed behind her.

Bucky groaned, letting his head fall back on his neck. “Damn it, she got me!" He rubbed his clean hand against the sheets anyway, because now he had the phantom sensation of greasepaint and couldn’t not, then wrapped Steve in a hug. Steve tipped his head down into it, burrowing in along next to Bucky’s ear. He didn’t speak immediately, and Bucky didn’t push him to, although Peggy was right, and they were on a schedule.

But there weren’t going to be too many moments like this. They were in a war, and unless Bucky could do something to change the past—now his future, and wasn’t that a terrible thought—then they were also being measured out against the ticking clock of a bomb. This was important.

Bucky let Steve have his moment.

After a while—not long; maybe half a minute—Steve’s arms tightened, impossibly, even further, and he turned his head to speak directly into Bucky’s ear, his voice low with closeness and grief. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I don’t want it, either,” he said, “but I have to.”

He felt a lot older than Steve, all of a sudden. Part of it was because he _was_ older; Bucky was twenty-seven, Steve had said he was only twenty-four. But there was also the matter of lived life experience, and there, Bucky knew, they were different.

Steve had never been kissed; Steve had also never done any of the things that came after kissing. He had never been to war, not yet—the USO didn’t count—and therefore couldn’t have killed a man yet, either. He’d probably never even _seen_ death: Steve had revealed not ten minutes ago that his mother died in a sanitarium, and he hadn’t been allowed to even open the casket because of the disease.

So while Steve had had a hard life, it wasn’t the kind of hard _Bucky_ knew. Two weeks ago, Bucky had strangled a man with his bare hands. Two _years_ ago—or sixty years from now—he had been locked in a cell and abandoned for about a week. He didn’t know how long it had been exactly, because he had lost track of the days, subsisting on rainwater and the hope that someone would find him in time; luckily, they had. (That had been the _first_ time Mbondu had saved his life, and Bucky had been trying to pay her back ever since.)

But even that scare hadn’t compared to the one he had felt when his first lover had started dying of AIDS, and had refused—no matter how much Bucky had begged him—to take the drugs. René had killed himself before the disease could, but it had only been a matter of time, and there had been a terrifying few weeks before Bucky’s tests had come back clean.

All that being said, though, Bucky was still certain Steve understood why he had to go. He was just a little disappointed that Steve was going to make him be the one to say it, anyway.

Except apparently that wasn’t it. Steve cut him off by tightening his arms around Bucky and didn’t immediately release again. “I’ve been alone for a long time,” he explained, mouth pressed close under Bucky’s ear. “I don’t want you to leave me now.”

Bucky gasped and twisted, clutching Steve back just as hard. “I _won’t,”_ he said fiercely—recklessly, all things considered, but he’d gotten far by being honest about his emotions, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to stop now. “Not _ever._ I can’t, now."

He bit Steve, the way he’d been a little bit wanting to since the first moment Steve took his shirt off, right on the puffy upward curve of his pec where the muscle was juicy and sensitive. He let his teeth close harder and harder, stopping just short of breaking the skin, letting the bruise sink in deep as Steve gasped and thrashed into his embrace.

Finally, he let go and licked the bruise before nuzzling up to Steve’s throat. “I have a mission now, yeah,” he admitted into the skin. “It’s important. There’s a war on, and _that’s_ important. But I will always, _always_ come back to you, Steve. No matter what. No mission, no—no _nothing,_ will keep me away from you, you hear me?" He looked up and met Steve’s eyes, took in the tears escaping over the bottom lid with a strange sense of satisfaction. He smiled up at Steve with a confidence he didn’t really feel. “I’ve been waiting for you, too, you know. Been waiting too damn long to let you go again. _No matter what."_

Steve met his eyes soberly and nodded. “I’ll look for you,” he swore, “if you don’t come back.”

They both knew too many men had not come back in this war, and if Bucky maybe knew more about _why,_ well, that knowledge gap wasn’t going to last too long.

“You can’t ever get away from me now, Bucky. I’m gonna come after you.”

Bucky breathed, a feeling of peace settling over him, and then sat up, lumbering to his feet to retrieve his jacket from where it had been thrown, all the way across the tiny room. “Well, not this time,” he threw over his shoulder, stooping to retrieve his coat. He gave it a little shake as he stood up, frowning as he checked that it was decent to wear. “This mission is straightforward; you can come after me on the next one, if you want.”

“I don’t want. I want you to come back on your own from that one, too.” Steve was frowning again. He still looked good, but Bucky decided he liked it better when Steve smiled instead. “What are you going to be doing, anyway?”

Bucky had put his cap on the desk when he entered, but it wasn’t there now; he searched briefly, located it under the chair, dusted it off and donned it. The rest of his outfit was okay, but the hat always felt like a damn costume to Bucky; one more undercover assignment, ho hum.

“It’s nothing big,” he assured Steve. “They think we have a mole. I’m gonna infiltrate one of our own units to try to find him—the 107th, if you’re keeping your ears open.”

“I haven’t heard anything,” Steve admitted, “but I can try to keep my ears open. I’ll pay more attention to what I hear about the individual units, anyway. If I hear something, I’ll do whatever I can to get it to you.”

 

* * *

 

Later, Steve would remember Bucky saying it was a milk-run, and want to kick him for jinxing it.

A week after meeting Bucky (his _soulmate!)_ , Steve was in a different camp, some miles to the south, waiting for Mike to join him once he got done sweet-talking Sally M (the redhead; Sally T was the blonde, and Mike was sweet-talking her, too). Two soldiers came in from the road looking beat to hell and ready to collapse as Steve sat there near the gate. Folks had been trickling in all day, Steve had noticed, and none of them had looked well-off. After the first few, a man in a flashy uniform had roared out in a Jeep with a grim look on his face, so Steve assumed something had gone horribly wrong somewhere.

The show tonight was going to be a big downer, he knew already. _And_ Mike was running late, so Steve might not even get a good dinner if he waited for him.

And it was raining.

So all things considered, Steve was mostly just sitting around ruminating on his own misery when he saw Peggy Carter slip out of the Command tent.

 _“Peggy?"_ He was on his feet in an instant, heading over to her in spite of the rain. “Is Bucky here with you?!”

Peggy looked up, saw him, and froze. “Steven,” she greeted him. “No, he isn’t. I’m terribly sorry.”

Steve nodded, and invited her to join him back under the dubious shelter of the storage tent. “He said he had a mission,” Steve mentioned, pretending he wasn’t worried. “Didn’t tell me more than that, of course.” A lie, but a lie to protect Bucky, who probably wasn’t supposed to have told Steve anything.

Peggy watched him steadily, then sighed. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll go check the casualty lists. I should have checked it already—certainly before I ran into you. The 107th just ran into—well, something we’ve never seen before.”

Steve felt himself pale and swallowed convulsively. “The 107th...?”

Peggy punched him in the shoulder before linking their arms together, her other hand resting comfortingly on his bicep. “But Barnes didn’t tell you anything else,” she said pointedly. She started walking at the same time, though, which was kind of her. Steve blushed and walked with her. “There were a lot of good men lost, Steve. Just the scale of it alone... but we’ll find out if Bucky was one of them.”

 

* * *

 

Phillips watched Steve and Peggy like a hawk watching a juicy rabbit, and faster than lightning he had started addressing Peggy. “You and I are gonna have a conversation later that you won’t enjoy."

“Please tell me if he’s alive, sir,” Steve butted in. “B—A—R—”

Phillips cut him off sharply, unimpressed. He glared at Peggy one more time before transferring his attention to Steve. “The unit was decimated by the attack, and of the missing, only half were killed. The rest were captured, being held thirty miles behind enemy lines.” He threw his pen to the desk and leaned back, crossing his arms. “We haven’t been able to count all the dead, but so far, Barnes is not among them.”

Steve’s heart squeezed and turned over like a faulty engine. “And what about a rescue mission, sir?”

Phillips’ lip curled. “Not that I expect a damn showgirl to know this, but I am actually _busy_ trying to _win the damn war!”_

“Sir...!”

“They’re too far back,” Phillips cut him off, “and I don’t have a spare platoon just lying around. Now if you don’t mind, I have condolence letters to sign—and if the posters are right, you have something you need to be doing, too.”

Steve looked down at Phillips’ desk, where the map was spread out, with marks at the site of the battle and the probable location of the hostages. “Yes, sir,” he agreed, his mind whirling. “I do.”

As he turned to leave, he saw Peggy and Phillips exchange a glance.

 

* * *

 

“Steve, wait." Peggy caught him just as he was getting ready to hotwire the Jeep. (Mike, bored one evening in Memphis because Caroline, Debbie and both Sallies were too mad to talk to him, had shown Steve how.)

Steve whirled from where he was settling the stage helmet and shield in the back of the vehicle. “Do you know what he is to me?” he demanded, not bothering to preface his words, although he kept his voice low.

Peggy fumbled for a second. “Of course I do,” she blustered, before rallying. “Do you know what he is to _me?"_

For one brief, horrible second, Steve thought Bucky might have two soulmarks and he would have to share. But then he threw it off and shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he said bluntly. “What?”

Peggy stepped closer and dropped her voice. “You know he came from the future.” It wasn’t quite a question, but it wasn’t quite a statement, either. Steve nodded. “He came from sixty years in the future, and _he recognized me._ He recognized me, and he knew about you, too—no, not Steve Rogers; but Captain America. Him, Bucky had heard of.”

Steve’s heart was thumping so loud in his chest he was surprised Peggy couldn’t hear it. “What are you getting at?” he asked.

Peggy grinned fiercely. “I’m saying that I _am going_ to make it through this war,” she told him. “And I’m going to go on to do great things. Which means that _I_ cannot afford to lose sight of the long goal, no matter how distracting the distractions—"

Her gaze flicked down Steve’s body and back up again.

“—and you..."

She poked him sharply in the center of his chest, right where the star of his uniform was hidden by his trenchcoat.

 _“...you_ should not bother to settle for a mere Jeep, in this instance.”

 

* * *

 

Howard Stark proved himself _delighted_ to fly them into occupied airspace in the face of heavy artillery.

 

* * *

 

Bucky didn’t recognize any of the men he was thrown in a cell with, because none of the Howling Commandos’ identities were ever declassified—it was only later, when Steve turned them into a team, that he would put the pieces together and realize he had not only met the Howlies, he had become one, himself.

All he knew in the moment was that his cell mates were the definition of the phrase “rag-tag,” and that _he_ was this close to passing out.

“Sacré bleu... [Someone get him lying down!]” someone exclaimed in French.

“I’m not that kind of boy,” Bucky tried to answer, but the world was gray and fuzzing around the edges, and he was pretty sure it came out in French.

Gentle hands caught him on the way down.

 

* * *

 

The next time he surfaced, he was being roughly shaken. “Hey,” someone said over his head.

Bucky tried to sit up, gasped at the pain, and then finished sitting up, anyway. There was a hand on his shoulder, and Bucky focused just enough to look down at it in confusion.

The dark-skinned man propping him up hissed and drew his hand back sharply, and Bucky felt like shit. That wasn’t how he had meant it. “Sergeant James Barnes,” he introduced himself hastily, sticking out his hand. “Call me Bucky.”

The man looked taken aback, but shook it. “Gabriel Jones, Private,” he said dryly, “so I’ll probably call you ‘Sergeant’.”

“In here, we can pretty much all call ourselves ‘dead meat’,” said a voice from the other side of the cell. “And if you don’t get up and come with us, you’ll be a lot deader, a lot faster.”

“[I will help you,]” the Frenchman promised, “[because you have helped me.].

That would make the Frenchman the guy Bucky had stepped in front of a beating for, then.

“[And because you have a _wonderful_ accent.]” the Frenchman continued, looking puzzled by it.

“[I have a good ear,]” Bucky said, shrugging it off. He’d also been stationed in St. Tropez for two months on the best assignment of his entire SHIELD career, but these guys didn’t get to know that.

“[Congratulations,]” said some jerkoff with a British accent thicker than a shoulder of roast beef. “Now, could we please get ready for the doors to open? Take it from someone who has been here longer than you. They don’t give out enough food, and if you’re not in the front of the line for the rations, you won’t get any.”

 

* * *

 

Their captors used them as labor in the factory, and it was hard, exhausting work that left no time to talk. That night, Bucky used his left arm to stretch his head to the side, trying to minimize the agony from his bruises in the morning. “Where are we, anyhow?" His mental map was one giant gray fog.

“Wretched little town in Italy,” the Englishman—Falsworth—told him. “It’s not even on the maps—the closest place that’s marked is Azzano, some six miles that way." He jerked his head at the east wall. Bucky had no idea if that was actually the right wall or not; Falsworth had a head for maps, it seemed, but that didn’t always go hand in hand with a sense of direction.

And then it clicked. “Wait a minute. Did you say Azzano?”

“...Yes?”

Happiness—or maybe it was hope—welled up inside of Bucky. He grinned. _“The_ Azzano?”

Falsworth’s face was the definition of the word _dubious._ “Almost certainly not,” he said.

Bucky shook his head. “Oh my god, it _is!_ Holy shit. Let me tell you something, fellas: we are going to get out of this.”

The whole cell was staring at him, now. “We are?” asked Dugan. He was the only guy Bucky knew from the 107th, a Corporal with an astonishing moustache. He currently looked like he thought Bucky was bonkers.

“We are,” Bucky promised. “Just keep your head down, don’t cause trouble—and don’t get picked up by the guards, that’s gonna be the main thing—" He had heard about the little “experimental” room upstairs, had heard about people not really coming back from there. “—and rescue will come. Is coming. I can’t believe I get to see this!”

The guys were exchanging glances like Bucky was crazy.

“You think they’re sending a rescue?” Morita asked.

“I think they’re sending Captain America,” Bucky grinned in answer.

So of course the next day, the guards came to take Bucky up to the torture room.

They didn’t even bother to call it the experimental room, at least not in German, which they didn’t know Bucky understood. They gave him a series of injections, and—just for giggles—some of more standard tortures. Bucky repeated his name, rank, and serial number, and made a point not to let on that he understood both German and French.

After a while, though, things started to get... strange. It was like the room was bubbling, or... slipping sideways. “What was in that syringe?” Bucky asked, only remembering to check afterwards that it had come out in English. He was pretty sure it had.

“An experimental compound,” Dr. Jerkoff—Zola, really—said. “Like all the rest. Is it working?”

Bucky’s stomach heaved. He only barely managed to turn his head enough to vomit onto Zola’s feet instead of his own face. Zola stepped back, dismayed.

“I’m gonna say that was a no,” Bucky said, his voice hoarse with puking.

Zola stormed out, and sent in the deputy torturers again.

Things got a bit hazy after that. Someone would beat him, or burn him, or choke him, and then Bucky would puke some more, and they would pause for about a minute and a half to hose down the floor before it started up again. After a while, Bucky had no more of their shitty gruel to cough up, and things got more intense.

Zola came back eventually. He stared at Bucky for a minute, then looked back at the Deputy Torturer. “[Were you working the entire time?]” he demanded in German.

The D.T. insisted that he had been.

“[Take his shirt the rest of the way off. I want to see how the marks look.]" Bucky’s breath caught in his throat as a cold finger of fear spread down his spine. Something wasn’t right, something beyond the obvious. What had _been_ in that syringe?

Zola didn’t touch him once he was stripped, but he leaned so close he might as well have, his nose only inches from Bucky’s skin. He grumbled to himself about the poor lighting—it _was_ pretty shitty for a science lab, although Bucky figured it was right on point for a torture chamber—but seemed pretty happy with Bucky’s appearance, anyway.

His eyes darted up to Bucky’s. “[It works,]” he bragged, apparently just to hear himself speak. “[I must test it further—but I am certain of it, it works!]"

 _What works?_ Bucky wanted to ask. He also didn’t want to ask. He dreaded finding out. Before he could make his mind up, though, Zola’s eyes fell on his arm, on the so-legible soulmark marching its way up his skin. A cruel smile flickered over his reptilian lips.

“One more test,” he announced in English. “To see how you heal, you understand. Have you met her?" The question came out conversation, and Zola’s bearing was faux-polite as he gestured at Bucky’s forearm.

Bucky paused, but shook his head.

“Ah,” Zola said, “then let us both hope the serum works as it should.”

 _Serum?_ Bucky thought.

Zola picked up a metal ruler, weighing it carefully in his hand, then shoved it into the small gaslight hanging off the wall.

“That will take a minute to heat up,” he apologized pleasantly. The sadistic smile widened, and his glasses glinted in the flickering light.

_Oh, no..._


	4. Chapter 4

Thank god some of the prisoners had pointed him in the right direction; Steve’s heart just about stopped when he saw Bucky strapped to the table. His shirt was off, discarded in a lump against the side of the room. Steve could see his chest rise and fall with his labored breathing.

 _“Bucky."_ Steve was over to the side of the table in a flash, undoing the first restraints he could put his hands on. “Damn, Bucky, what did they do to you?!”

“Steve?" Bucky’s head rolled, his eyes clouded with pain. He gasped. “Steve... Steve, they took my words.”

Steve’s gaze fell automatically to Bucky’s left arm, where the flesh now bore a wound an inch wide and six inches long where the soulmark had once been, black and bubbled, with clear liquid leaking from under the waxy-looking skin.

Steve’s heart clenched at the sight. It hurt, shockingly much so, to see the evidence of their intertwined fates burned away like that. He bit his lip to keep back the first three things that came to mind. “No malingering,” he said instead, hoarsely. “Hey, at least you’ve still got your arm, right?”

Bucky gave a gasping laugh, true but pain-filled. “Right,” he said. “Help me up.”

 

* * *

 

With over a hundred people to evacuate—over _two_ hundred, counting the resistance members and non-American military personnel that were in with them—the S.S.R. decided to send the 107th to London for recovery. Still embedded in the unit, Bucky went with them; Steve didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.

By the time he found Bucky—and the rest of his new team—in a London pub, Bucky was clean and in complete disregard of proper uniform regs, not that Steve cared much about that. He was drinking, a pint glass in his hand and a shot glass in front of him on the bar, with a haunted look in his eye. From his left sleeve, the tip of a scar poked out, shiny and pink but otherwise nearly healed.

“This seat taken?”

The darkness didn’t exactly leave Bucky’s eyes when he looked up and saw Steve, but he did look a hell of a lot happier. “It is now,” Bucky welcomed him, kicking out the chair for him. “I hear you’re putting together a team.”

“You’ve got good ears.”

Bucky laughed, a bitter shade underlying real amusement. “I’ve got a lot of good things.” He said it like it wasn’t that good.

“Gentlemen.”

Steve jumped when Peggy spoke from right behind him. Bucky, he noticed, did not; instead, Bucky sent an amused eyebrow up and took another drink, although the twist didn’t leave his smile.

“Peggy. I—hi. What are you—?”

“I’m not here for you,” she said briskly, although the smile she gave him along with the words was warm. “Barnes.”

“Carter.”

She tipped her head faintly in Steve’s direction. “Two parts, you said?”

Bucky gave a harsh little laugh. “Yeah,” he answered, “nice job—you spotted it."

 _Two parts of what?_ Steve wondered.

“Mm-hmmm... Anything else you’d care to share? Now that we’re not wrapped in the loving arms of the American Army, I mean.”

Bucky didn’t meet her eyes. Instead, he looked up at Steve, a tortured expression on his face, and then down at the bar again. “Nothing you can do anything with.”

Peggy stilled, her eyelids fluttering as she processed that— _whatever_ it had meant. “I see...” she said slowly. “Bucky...”

He shook his head and cut her off. “I’ve got it,” he said sharply. “There’s a plan.”

Peggy pressed her lips together, but didn’t push. “I’ll see you both tomorrow,” she said instead. “Oh-eight-hundred sharp.”

Steve leaned forward and stole the shot glass, knocking it back for courage even though Erskine had said he couldn’t get drunk anymore. “You free between now and oh-eight-hundred?” he asked.

Bucky nodded.

Steve licked his lips nervously and lowered his voice. “Then do you think I could persuade you to be busy with me?”

Bucky’s eyes snapped up to Steve’s face, widening in surprise. Slowly, his gaze wandered all over Steve’s body, lingering on his hands, still clasped around the glass, then his legs and other lower body before rising slowly to Steve’s face again. Steve was flushed by the time he was done, his skin feeling hot and swollen from the attention.

Bucky smirked, then cut his gaze away, staring at the countertop for long moments before he stole the glass back again and gestured for the bartender to fill it. “Sure,” he said, knocking back the shot. “You got a place?”

 

* * *

 

They tumbled through the door of the hotel room like it was their first time walking, like everything was new and nothing would ever be the same. Steve had his arms wrapped around Bucky, holding on because Bucky’s mouth was making his knees weak, and because he felt like he might spin right away without a lifeline to tether him. Kissing Bucky—hell, just _being around_ Bucky—was so different from anything Steve had ever felt before. It was _not-aloneness,_ it was _new_ and _exciting_ and—

He broke away, gasping. “I love you,” he said. “Bucky. I’m so glad.”

Bucky’s hands tightened like he was trying to hold the stars together. “Same,” he said hoarsely. “Jesus, Steve.”

They kissed again, tripping and staggering into the room. Bucky stumbled and tore free, only for Steve to half-fall trying to get his shirt off. “Easy,” Bucky said. “It’s okay; we’ve got all night."

Steve thought about answering him, and then surprised himself by whining inarticulately instead. Bucky didn’t seem too bothered; he just laughed, gently. “I know, I know; you haven’t done this before. I have, though—it’s a lot more common in the future, even folks with soulmates—and I know how to make it good for you. Let me, okay?”

Steve had to clear his throat twice before he could respond. “Okay.”

Bucky’s hands were sure and steady. He took off Steve’s uniform with gentle touches that were as much caresses as they were functional, and urged Steve to lie down in the bed while he hung it in the clothes press. He stripped himself down, too, while he was over there, standing naked limned in dim golden light, half-hard and shivering faintly. His eyes were full of tenderness and a fragile sort of hope. Steve wanted to wrap his arms around him, and a blanket, and kiss his edges into curves.

Bucky came back to bed and Steve made a good start on it, finding a place at the corner of Bucky’s mouth that made him shudder. From there it seemed logical to spread out his kisses, a search for more of those spots. He kissed Bucky’s jaw, and ear, and neck, making Bucky hum happily as he stroked his hands up and down Steve’s ribs. Steve tried sucking on Bucky’s earlobe, something Bucky had done to him last time, and got a strangled yell as a reward.

Bucky’s hands curled in Steve’s hair, pulling gently and sending ribbons of desire spirally hotly out from Steve’s core. “Ah!” Steve gasped. “Bucky!”

“Yeah..." Bucky gave him a wicked sort of grin. “My turn.”

He applied his own teeth to Steve neck, and Steve had to savagely bite his own lip not to shout with it. It felt—! It felt _amazing,_ the top of Steve’s head blowing off and leaving him floating, weightless, and on fire with arousal.

 _“Please,”_ he heard, and then realized that he had been the one who said it. _Please what?_ he thought, but couldn’t have answered himself. He had only the vaguest idea what a man did with a woman; what a man did with another man was a complete mystery.

Bucky knew, though; he had said that. If you had asked Steve five years ago if he would be okay with his soulmate not waiting, Steve might have been unsure, but now he was downright grateful for it. Bucky knew what to do. Thank goodness.

He kissed his way down Steve’s body, took him apart with his mouth and hands. He shattered Steve into a thousand pieces with his tongue, sucking him until he sobbed and begged, then pulling off just before he exploded. He milked the last of Steve’s seed out of him, smearing it over Steve’s stomach, then wrapped his hand around himself.

Bucky walked forward on his knees, one on each side of Steve’s hips, rising up over him like an ancient god. And—if this was how the ancient gods looked, then Steve had a lot more sympathy for Ganymede. Bucky was beautiful, the warm glow of the electric lights playing off his muscles, slim and athletic and perfect. Steve folded up, kissing him again because he had to, and Bucky jerked as Steve’s stomach brushed against him. It must feel good—Steve remembered the mess on his skin, and deliberately writhed against Bucky’s cock, earning a groan and another thrust. They kissed and kissed, hot and powerful, as Bucky thrust against him. He came, and collapsed into Steve’s arms.

It was perfect, Steve thought, easing them down to the mattress. Bucky was perfect. _They_ were perfect. The room smelled of sex and sweat and _Bucky._ It was a perfect moment.

He brushed the hair off of Bucky’s face, happiness boiling within him at the sight of Bucky’s relaxed, smug little grin, at the crinkles that had formed in the corners of Bucky’s eyes. His own grin was spreading across his face, stupid with pleasure. Perfect, he thought again.

He dropped off to sleep, still trying to etch this memory forever into his mind.

[ ](https://imgur.com/ADTec8c)

 

* * *

 

Steve fell asleep first afterward, snuggling into Bucky and the thin blankets because they were the warmest things in the room. Bucky stayed up later, watching the dust motes dance in the air and listening to the thunder and cracks of the bombardment.

He thought about the relief he had felt, looking up and seeing Steve bent over him. Thought about the anguish when he knew that his words were gone.

(Didn’t think about how quickly that wound was healing.)

He thought, too, about the grim set of Steve’s mouth as he talked about the things they had found in the factory. Steve wasn’t as naive as Bucky had originally thought, it seemed... Bucky shifted in the bed, turning in Steve’s arms until they were roughly spooning. It felt good, having someone hold him... It had been a long time, and Steve was so warm...

For now.

Everything had happened just like the history books said. Every step of the way: the show, the rescue, the formation of the Howling Commandos... Next was the attempt to take HYDRA bases all over the continent. Suddenly Bucky had a pretty good idea what Carter wanted Steve for at eight o’clock in the morning

Then the last assault, the one that led to the launch of the _Valkyrie._ Bucky would have to find a way to sneak aboard the _Valkyrie_ without anyone the wiser, sabotage the navigation controls so that they could steer the plane to a landing, and get Steve off of it. And he wouldn’t have a shot at doing any of that unless he could get himself assigned at Steve’s side... Carter would probably be alright with it. He’d just have to make sure she knew the stakes...

Plus, Bucky already knew how to fly most kinds of aircraft, thanks to his time with SHIELD. So at least he wouldn’t be learning on the fly—so to speak—with an impossibly complicated set of controls.

He could do this. He could save Steve. And that...

He closed his eyes, enjoying the feeling of warm, strong arms wrapped around him, the soft, warm puff of Steve’s breath upon his neck.

...that was all that mattered.

It shouldn’t have been possible, feeling this much, this soon. Shouldn’t have been realistic to lose your heart to a guy within a day of meeting him. Soulmate or not, surely they should’ve taken some time to get to know each other, right?

But no. Bucky was all-in; immediately, recklessly in love. His chest burned with the size of it, aching and throbbing like the now-healed wound on his arm had. _(Not thinking about that.)_ He pressed himself close against Steve like he was the most important thing in the world— _because he was._ Impossibly huge in Bucky heart and mind, inescapably entrenched. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

Bucky didn’t know what he would do if he failed. If he wasn’t able to board the Valkyrie, if Steve plummeted alone into the ice and cold waters of the northern Atlantic. Steve’s bulk was a softly snoring mass behind him and here he was thinking about the worst, but it was true: he didn’t know how he would survive if he lost Steve.

 

* * *

**January, 1945:**

* * *

 

The train rumbled on along the tracks. Steve could feel the vibrations coming up through the soles of his boot. Bucky was gripping like iron to a railing that ran along the outside of the train, but that couldn’t last forever. His face was pale with fear and strain. Steve leaned out, further and further, trying to reach him—

“Take my hand!"

The wind whipped his voice away, but Bucky had heard him anyway. Their eyes met, and Steve could see Bucky readying himself to reach out.

Too slow.

Before Bucky could do it, before he could pry one of his hands loose, the bar ripped away from the metal hull of train car and fell, tumbling, from Bucky’s reaching hands. He grew smaller and smaller. His eyes were open and terrified as he disappeared forever. 

Steve was screaming.

Bucky was gone.

Steve closed his eyes, curling in miserably against the cold, cold bulk of the train.

 

* * *

 

After that, everything was numb, remote and dim as if Steve were hearing the world underwater. Gabe brought in Zola—thank God, because Steve would never have had the presence of mind to take him alive. Not after Bucky. Not after what he had _done_ to Bucky.

Peggy got him through a lot of it. Talked him down in the bar. Talked him out of a couple very stupid plans. Didn’t quite manage it for the plan they went with, which was also pretty dumb, but Steve had a hunch it was the kind of dumb that worked instead of the kind of dumb that just got him killed.

He almost wished, when he came face to face with Schmidt, that Schmidt would just _do it._ Take him out, put an end to it.

Bucky would hate that, he thought. But God, it would be so _easy..._

They took the fucking fortress. They captured the fucking HYDRA goons. They got Schmidt—

They didn’t get Schmidt.

Steve was standing in the airplane hangar, watching the plane taxi and ready to scream, when Peggy and Phillips rolled up in Schmidt’s beautiful car. “Get in,” Phillips said grimly, and Steve did. The car—

The car _accelerated._ A _lot._

Steve _deeply appreciated_ the fucking car.

They closed on the plane, but there wasn’t a chance of them bringing it down. Peggy and Steve exchanged a speaking glance.

She hugged him goodbye, and he jumped.

 

* * *

 

The tesseract was gone. That was something, at least. Steve could take comfort in that.

And Schmidt. He was gone, too, thank God, burned away by the power of the very thing he’d been trying to control. There was some justice in that, Steve thought, watching the water below spread to encompass more and more of the windshield as he approached. Some justice to the thought of being destroyed by the very mystery you sought to conquer... Like having the Tower of Babel fall right onto your head.

The water was getting bigger. Soon, it would be the only thing he could see. He could make out individual waves, now; benefits of having enhanced eyesight, he supposed. Or “benefits,” anyway.

He was going to die. It didn’t feel real, somehow. There was still a part of his mind going, “I could—!” and “if only—!” as though unable to believe that this was really going to happen. He thought that might be a comfort, too, actually. That he didn’t have to believe it was over. That there was going to be a “next.”

What _would_ happen next, really?

Was there a Heaven? A Hell?

Would he see Bucky again?

 _I want to,_  he thought. _I choose to believe that._ _I’m going to see Bucky again. Soon._

_Soulmates, right? That means we’re together forever. Even after death._

_I_ hope _after death; our forever didn’t last very long._

He added up the days they'd had together in his head, came to a total just over a year. It seemed like longer, somehow. Like Bucky had always been there, looking at him with such love in his eyes... Except, no, because Steve could remember feeling alone, too. All alone, for so long... How strange, that he could hold both feelings in his mind at the same time...

 _But not forever,_ he thought. _Soon. Soon I’ll see him again._ He could picture Bucky now: the way he would be exasperated with Steve for crashing the plane—“ _What did you have to do that for?” he would ask—_ but also accepting. He knew—it was obvious, now, in retrospect—Bucky had known all along how this story was going to end.

 _He didn’t know about his own death, though._ The thought was bitter enough to bring him back to himself.

Four thousand feet.

Three thousand feet.

_I wish we’d had more time._

One thousand feet.

_Good-bye. I’ll see you—_

_—soon._

 

* * *

**April, 2012**

* * *

  

Steve woke up in a room full of lies. The whole thing was fake: the walls were fake, the radio was fake, the goddamn sunlit _curtains_ were fake. The _nurse_ was fake, too, and he smashed his way past her, aching and furious and trying to escape a reality that he already knew was bigger than he was.

By the time Nick Fury told him what year it was, he wasn’t even surprised. _Too late to see Bucky again,_ that was what year it was.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a reminder that there are two more chapters of this to go, and that Steve does not actually die.


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

**October, 2007:**

* * *

 

Bucky woke up in the SHIELD infirmary. He knew it was the SHIELD infirmary because there were giant stylized eagles on everything, from the wall to the clipboard hanging from the base of his bed. He also knew it because he woke up cuffed to the bed; SHIELD tended to view agents who were captured and then re-captured, which was how Bucky would look from their perspective, with a fair amount of suspicion. It was just SHIELD’s luck—and Bucky’s, he supposed, if you could call it luck—that the handcuffs slowed Bucky down enough that he didn’t do anything drastic. Instead, he sat back against the pillows, still as a corpse while he lost his mind with grief.

Mbondu and Merritt had rescued him; that was the only explanation. He woke up, back in the future and with about a million IV lines taped into his skin—yeah, that was SHIELD’s work. Bucky left the IV’s in place; he knew from experience how testy it made the nursing staff when you ripped them out. And besides, that didn’t really... seem worth the bother, now. Somehow.

Steve was dead.

Bucky didn’t have to check the history books to be sure of that one; his common sense told him, but so did his heart, throbbing in pain. Bucky hadn’t made it to the _Valkyrie,_ his one damned goal the whole fucking time; he hadn’t managed to keep the plane from crashing. _Hadn’t managed to go down with it, if worst came to worst._ Instead, he was... here, for his sins... and Steve was...

...gone.

Bucky flinched at air and pressed himself back into the raised mattress, the cannula making an awful whistling sound as his breath started hitching. His eyes filled. He looked around the room, but if there was a camera or a mike, he couldn’t spot them. And the door was closed.

Bucky closed his eyes and tilted his head back, letting himself weep.

 

* * *

 

Mbondu came to see him first, working her way into the room sideways as if he were a case of live explosives from which she was trying to keep her distance. He couldn’t have said she was wrong, either; he felt delicate, primed to go off, his head too large and wobbly on his neck. His eyes were raw and gritty from crying, and then sleeping, and then _not_ sleeping even when he wanted to.

Mbondu took one look at him and said, “That bad, huh?”

Bucky just swallowed and looked away. He knew what his face was doing, and some part of him would probably be ashamed of it, if he remembered it later. He had never really been a person who looked _bleak_ before, but that was definitely how he felt now.

 _Gone,_ he thought, _Steve is gone. Dead, gone, forever—_

“That bad,” he croaked.

She was silent. Bucky heard her come closer, but she didn’t speak until she was sitting in the chair at his bedside. It was one of those solid, uncomfortable ones, Bucky noticed. Wooden arms, no adjustable anything. Hard cushion, probably.

He really didn’t care about the cushion.

“I need to know what happened,” she said softly. An apology, but not a real on. “For the report. You know that.”

He did. Standard procedure; SHIELD even had a little form for it. They had a form for everything, really. He thought this one was Form MX-7-something.

He couldn’t look at her. “Not yet. Let me—process. One day. Please, just let me—”

One day would dull the knife-sharp clarity of the memory, would let him put a veil of fuzziness between himself and the images. He wouldn’t have to see every detail of Steve’s face, anymore, as he fell away from it, into the chasm, helpless to stop Steve from going to his death—

Mbondu sighed. “Bucky...”

But she didn’t say anything else. After a second, a tissue dabbed away the tear that was tracing down his upturned cheek. He appreciated that; the tears were itching on his skin, which was red and swollen from too much grief.

He didn’t open his eyes, though. Mbondu leaned over and patted his hand, then left.

When she was gone, Bucky turned his head to look down at where she had tucked his SHIELD badge into his palm.

 

* * *

 

An hour or two later, it was Merritt who came to debrief him, instead, and Bucky had to hold back a laugh. As manipulations went, this one was both perfectly obvious, and perfectly effective. Which was sort of their team’s whole modus operandi, really.

“Report, Barnes.” Merritt’s voice was a command, but a soft one;

Bucky swallowed. “Time travel,” he said simply.

Merritt snorted and smiled, a grim little press of the lips. She managed to look comfortable in the terrible chair, but Bucky wasn’t sure if that was because she actually _was_ comfortable, or just good at looking that way. “Yes, we gathered that,” she said, dry enough to dessicate aloe.

Bucky met her eyes. “What else did you gather?”

“We’d really like to hear it from you, first.”

That was true, he knew; standard protocols dictated that they not lead the witnesses, standard protocols said—but _fuck_ standard protocols. Bucky gritted his teeth. “1944,” he said. “I met Director Carter—Agent Carter, then. That was cool.” He wasn’t making it sound cool, though. He made it sound like he would rather eat glass shards than talk about it.

“Did you tell them about SHIELD?”

“I told... some people. Not a lot; just enough to get security clearance, help out a bit. Got put on some missions for the S.S.R., that sort of thing.” He saw her eyes twitch down to his forearm, then, and knew that this scar, at least, he would have to explain.

He would rather tear his eyes out of their sockets than tell her about Steve, but at least Zola had been a vicious bastard, because now Bucky had something else he could talk about, instead.

He told her everything, then. Everything except Steve. How he had convinced Carter to take him on, how he had gone undercover with the 107th only to be captured... He made the mistake of telling Merritt where the factory was, and had the bittersweet pleasure of watching her geek out for a minute. Bittersweet, because of course then she asked, “Did you meet Captain America?”

She didn’t know his name.

Nobody did, anymore.

Bucky met her eyes. “He’s exactly as amazing as you’ve heard,” he said. If his voice cracked in the middle of it, at least he had meant every word.

Merritt was a professional. She might have been dancing internally, but she got back to the interrogation. “So then what happened?"

Bucky took a deep breath and, grateful, told her something else that didn’t involve Steve.

 

* * *

 

He got a mandatory month of recovery time, which was SHIELD standard after being tortured. “I know it’s been some time for you since the actual incident, but the time travel _must_ have been similarly awful. Just take it,” Merritt advised.

So he did. He took an extra month, too, because he had the vacation saved up, and because he knew himself well enough to know that one month would not be enough to grieve for the death of his soulmate.

Neither would two, really, but that was what he had available. And the one thing he had been able to hold onto—the one thing that had gone back in time with him, and then forward again, and hadn’t been lost along the way—was his vocation. He was still an Agent of SHIELD, and no one had been able to wrest that out of his hands.

It was all he had left, now. He would just have to do it.

He sort of thought it was what Steve would have wanted.

 

* * *

**December, 2007:**

* * *

 

Bucky’s mom was the only one he told about his soulmate, and even her, he only told right before he was due to ship out again. He and his sister, Becca, had been thick as thieves when they were younger, but he didn’t even trust Becca to keep this silent. And his father had never approved of Bucky’s soulmate, who he had been sure would be a cradle-robber, or a man, or—most likely—both.

But Bucky’s mom had always filled his head with romance and passion. She was a woman for whom the image of the world had the saturation turned way, way up. His mom loved baking and knitting and math, talked about music like it was poetry, talked about poetry like it was religion. His mom would understand.

She cried for him because his tears had long ago run out, held him tight when he told her that Steve had been a romantic—“Like you,” he added, and she sobbed even harder. He couldn’t tell her about the time travel, of course, but he had been able to tell her that Steve was a military man. Had told her almost everything else. And then he told her Steve was dead, and made it sound like he had died in Afghanistan, or Iraq, fighting terrorists, instead of in the cold North Atlantic, saving the lives of thirty million or more people, including Gram and Gramps and, by extension, Bucky’s own family.

She cried and held him anyway, though. She didn’t need to know Steve was a hero; all she needed to know was that Bucky had loved him.

Bucky _still_ loved him, but now he was gone.

And Bucky still had a job to do.

 

* * *

**(Early) July, 2008:**

* * *

 

“You should have told me.”

Mbondu’s words came from his blind spot, and he jumped and swung in one motion before processing who was there. She blocked, and he fumbled, falling off his bar stool and landing on his ass.

He shook his head sadly, and then a couple more times, too, staring at her in silence. Eventually, it occurred to him that a) she couldn’t read his mind and b) _he_ couldn’t read _her_ mind, so they had better starting conversing like actual people.

“Help me up,” he said.

She helped him up. When he went to go back to his bar stool, though, she held onto his arm and shook her head at him. “This way." She led him to a booth, pouring him onto the bench seat facing the door and then sliding in after him, effectively pinning him in place at the same time she guaranteed their sightlines.

A waiter came by. Bucky tried to order a beer; Mbondu succeeded in ordering a scotch (for her) and a lot of food (for him).

Bucky waited until the pink-haired waitress had walked away, then asked the obvious question. “I should have told you what?”

“About your soulmate,” Mbondu said softly. “I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

Bucky slumped in the seat even more than he already had been. “I can’t believe you interrogated my _mom,”_ he muttered, then added more loudly, “It’s not affecting my work.”

“Hmm, we can’t know that, can we? And besides—” She knew better than to let him press that point. “—it’s irrelevant. For one thing, it affects your file—”

 _“Fuck_ my file!”

“—and for another, _rather more important_ thing, it affects you!" She covered Bucky’s hand with her own and looked into his eyes. _Not_ earnestly, not the way Steve would have done it, but simply. Calmly. “I would have grieved with you, my friend.”

It was the tranquility of her statement that did it. “...There’s still time,” Bucky admitted. He gestured to the pub. “It would have been his birthday.”

“Ah,” said Mbondu, taking up her glass immediately after the waiter had set it down in front of her. “Is that why we’re having a wake!"

She tipped her scotch wryly in his direction and took a sip, then set it down. She let her hand linger on it, though, long fingers running laps around the rim, sliding on the wetness there, catching faintly on the transferred traces of her lip balm.

“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Tell me everything. I want to know everything about this man who was so important to you.”

Mbondu didn’t have a soulmate. She did have a heart, though. Sometimes that was enough.

“You can’t tell Merritt,” Bucky hedged.

“Ah. No.” Mbondu tipped her scotch at him again. “I’m going to be making something up for Merritt, I’m afraid. Please don’t get us both fired.”

Bucky nodded, an acknowledgement and an agreement, both at once. “He was friends with Peggy...” he started.

In the end, he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her Steve was Captain America. He told her everything else, though, and somehow, that did it. The thing inside of Bucky that was infected and weeping—the thing that would have had him chasing planes down their runways in his car tonight, if Mbondu hadn’t come along—was lanced. It leaked clear fluid out of his heart, and eventually, by the end of the night, it was clean and healing, at last.

 

* * *

**May, 2012:**

* * *

 

Four years later found Bucky on a mission in Madripoor. It was raining. The second fact could be reasonably inferred from the first.

He was currently hip-deep in mud. Mbondu was laughing at him, which she really shouldn’t have been because Mbondu was _tits-_ deep in mud, and anyway, this was all her fault.

But it _was_ kinda funny... Bucky was the bigger man, he could admit that.

“Okay,” he said, “one more time. And this time, pray the cow actually likes us.”

Merritt rolled her eyes, probably questioned every last one of her life choices, and urged the animal—not a cow, but Bucky was pretty sure it wasn’t actually an ox, either; maybe a yak?—to walk forward once more.

The cow moved. Bucky and Mbondu came up another four inches out of the mud.

The cow stopped moving. Bucky and Mbondu sank back another two inches into the mud.

“Well, it’s progress,” Merritt said philosophically.

 

* * *

 

By the time they were clear of the mud, it was an hour later, the sun had set—or Bucky assumed it had, anyway; the cloud-covered sky had gotten darker, at least—and they were all exhausted, shivering from the cold and low blood sugar. Merritt had a couple of protein bars in her vest, which she passed around—Bucky had some, too, but he was pretty sure his were too mud-encrusted to eat—and they scarfed them as their yak-wagon (it _was_ a yak!) made its slow, steady way back to the village where their target had been hiding out.

“The next time they assign us a fetch quest, I’m quitting,” Merritt muttered.

“What’s a ‘fetch quest’?” Bucky asked, although the question probably came out garbled due to the half a protein bar in his mouth.

 _“This_ was a fetch quest,” Merritt sighed. “When your objective is to retrieve something that anyone with half a brain would already have acquired, that’s a fetch quest. Like getting five healing potions for the healer, or something.”

“It didn’t start out a fetch quest,” Mbondu said, her air that of a woman trying to look on the bright side.

“And yet!" Merritt gestured dramatically to the calf in the back of the yak-wagon. Bucky was pretty sure it was a calf; whatever the word was for a baby yak, anyway. Bucky had named it Ferdinand.

(The baby yak had been stuck in the mud. To buy their undercover physicist—Su Yin, a Chinese ex-pat—time to analyze the dataset they had brought her, they were rescuing the baby yak in her stead. At which point, Bucky and Mbondu had gotten stuck in the mud in the baby yak’s stead.

Bucky was an agent of SHIELD. He put his life on the line for world security _every day,_ damn it.)

By the time they got back to the village—which, thankfully, had plenty of electricity and running water for them to clean off and warm up with—the baby yak was asleep, and Bucky wanted nothing more than to follow it into oblivion. Their jeep was just around the other side of the physicist’s house—Merritt checked it while Bucky and Mbondu were showering, and confirmed that it had not been tampered with—and Su Yin was so grateful for the return of the baby yak that she made them the Madripoor answer to tacos, which they ate with gratitude. She turned down the offer to emigrate to the US with them (apparently her soulmate was here, and Bucky wished he didn’t know exactly how much that meant) and urged them to eat in her living room, since her dining room table was set low to the ground, awkward for Westerners. She even fiddled with the TV until it started picking up all the stations it shouldn’t have been able to receive.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Bucky said in his best mangled Cantonese.

“Sit down and eat your finami,” Su Yin said in English, with an accent that mixed Texas with China and did neither country any favors. Or—Texas wasn’t a country... Principality. State. No, that was two different meanings of the word state...

Fuck it, he decided, Texas _thought_ itself a country, anyway.

...And judging by the state of his thoughts, he was very, very tired. He was going to need to find some place to take a nap pretty soon; maybe on their flight back to the States...?

And then he looked up at the television, which was showing color footage of Captain America.

Suddenly, Bucky wasn’t tired at all.


	6. Chapter 6

Steve adjusted.

He read the briefing packets—the Howling Commandos were all dead, and it wasn’t a surprise but it still hurt, anyway—and he studied the synopses of his new team members, trying to get a feel for how they would all work together. It all made a lot more sense once he met them.

Stark was the showman, a thorn in everybody’s side, because it was only when you poked people that you got results. Steve admired the technique even as he lost his temper, his mind still too raw from his own displacement and loss to have any patience with the man. Natasha was unruffleable and professional, her calm a soothing relief after Stark’s dramatics—at least until Steve realized she was acting a role, just as deliberately as Stark was.

Thor was a cipher, because Steve was sure that there was more to him than he let on. He gave the man plenty of space, respected his dignity, and waited to see how their dynamic would shake out. And Bruce was so humble and good-natured that Steve liked him immediately, silently resolving to never, _ever_ let on to him that he liked the Hulk a little bit more. (There was just something in Steve that was always going to be happy about smashing things.)

But _Clint..._ Clint was far more painful to Steve than he would ever have believed possible.

Clint was... Well, he was a SHIELD agent, for one thing. It was easy enough to see that “shield” was the word Bucky had been trying not to say around Steve, and even easier to see the way the profession had shaped both men. Both had hollows in their eyes. Both were snipers, so smoothly efficient that Steve didn’t even have to think about it. Both were tight-lipped about missions, straightforward about everything else.

Steve forgot which one he was talking to, sometimes. His chest ached, and ached, and _ached._

The Chitauri came, and were removed again. The team went for “shawarma,” dear God. Tony offered them places to stay, and Steve thought for a whole fifteen minutes about taking him up on it.

“Can we see the place first?” he asked, trying to keep his voice mild.

Tony must have been making an equal effort at keeping the peace, because he agreed expansively and without quibble.

The apartments were huge—too huge, although Clint gave an impressed whistle when he saw them, so maybe nowadays some people liked that—and sparsely furnished with a sort of opulent emptiness that set Steve’s teeth on edge for no reason he could particularly name. Steve’s “apartment” had three bedrooms, and took up the entire southwest quadrant of the sixty-seventh floor. It wasn’t any kind of special treatment, though. All that room must be Tony’s definition of “basic living space,” since Steve’s was completely identical to the other four apartments, the ones Tony offered the other Avengers. That was the only thing that kept Steve from pitching a fit about them; Natasha, Clint, and Thor all seemed to accept them as their due, although each gave different reasons when Steve asked them about it later.

 

* * *

 

All of the Avengers, despite Steve’s and Bruce’s hesitance to accept Tony’s largess, did spend the night in their new apartments. This had less to do with coming around on them they it did with being exhausted from battling aliens. After all, the apartments came with both beds and showers, and it had been a _very_ long day.

When he woke up in the morning, there were deliveries of fresh pastries and clean clothes in his size outside his door, so Steve did what he normally would have done and went for a run.

By the time he came back, showered again, and changed, Nick Fury was already there, looking at the damage to the room with a critical eye and swirling about in his trenchcoat. He even let off a snide, “Nice of you to join us, Captain,” which Steve thought was a bit uncalled for. Just because he had gone and run a marathon before they all met for breakfast didn’t mean he was late, after all.

They organized their plans for dealing with the tesseract—which Thor was keeping—and Loki—which no one liked the idea of Thor keeping. “You’ve already let his ass escape once,” Fury said.

Impolite, but not wrong.

Still—“There are ladies present,” Steve pointed out.

He couldn’t have said who looked more indignant at the comment, Nick or Natasha.

In the end, they agreed to give SHIELD twenty-four hours to question Loki—under Thor’s direct supervision, since no one trusted that Loki wasn’t going to attempt to pull anything, otherwise—and the scepter was turned over to SHIELD’s scientists to study.

Stark came after Steve once the negotiations were done.

“All that we found, and you’re just going to turn it over to them?” Stark demanded.

 _I trust SHIELD because Bucky did,_ Steve couldn’t say. Instead, he opened his mouth, and the words, “SHIELD may be greedy, but our best hope of checking them comes from cooperation, not opposition,” came out, instead.

They weren’t _untrue,_ he supposed. But still a little tough to hear himself say.

Stark shook his head. “Thor’s taking Loki and the Tesseract off-world tomorrow at noon; I’ll be there, but don’t think it’s a sign I approve of this plan. I don’t. This is a terrible plan.”

It sort of was, but there weren’t any better ones.

Steve didn’t say that.

 _What makes you think I trust you any more than I trust SHIELD?_ he thought.

Probably best he didn’t say that one, either.

“Look,” he sighed, “Stark—”

“Excuse me.” JARVIS’ disturbingly measured tones interrupted, which was almost certainly for the best. “There is a commotion at the security desk downstairs.”

 

* * *

 

The thing about security guards that most people didn’t know was that they weren’t particularly trained to stop anyone from doing anything. They were armed—the one at the desk in front of Bucky was gripping a taser pretty tightly—and this being Stark Tower, the guys Bucky was facing were all vets, which meant a certain amount of skill and discipline. But the job of security personnel in someplace like this was, firstly, to _discourage_ anyone from trying anything, and then, secondly, to smoothe over conflicts if they arose.

Keep things quiet, basically.

So Bucky came in noisy, and it worked _beautifully._

It wasn’t hard, for a lot of reasons: to start with, he actually _was_ furious. He let some of his righteous indignation show on his face, and raised his voice until people across the lobby were looking over, and hey, presto, someone was showing him an elevator and explaining that it would take him to the penthouse.

Bucky did not for one minute believe that it would actually take him to the penthouse. For one thing, that would be stupid. For another, the guards had more tells than a poker table full of fifth graders. But it _did_ get him out of sight of civilians, and Bucky was pretty confident in his ability to sneak around the tower once there wasn’t anybody to get hurt in the crossfire.

The elevator came to a halt midway up the shaft, and Bucky cheerfully hitched himself up on the handrails that lined the car. He reached towards the ceiling, balancing with his legs spread to reach the trap door on ceiling.

He was working on the trap door’s lock when the elevator jolted into motion again, some three minutes later. (It was a good lock.) He cursed when he dropped his picks, hopping down to the floor again to pick them up off the blue and white tiles. When he came to his feet again, the elevator was slowing and opening onto an empty conference room.

Or— _almost_ empty, anyway.

Steve Rogers stood at the center of it.

 

* * *

 

When JARVIS told them about the disturbance, Steve’s first reaction was to confront it, head-on. “Any idea what this guy _wants,_ JARVIS?" He hit the button to close the doors on the elevator, even though he knew it didn’t do anything. JARVIS controlled the elevators, and everything else about the building, no matter what buttons the petty humans who crawled around in it pushed or pulled or twisted. Steve was eager, though. There was a roiling under his skin, a hunger for some kind of a fight.

A disturbance. That sounded just about perfect, to him.

“Apparently... you, Captain.”

Steve looked up, even knowing that JARVIS’s camera feeds were multi-level. Everyone always looked up—except Tony, who never looked around at all.

“He came in insisting upon seeing you, Captain. He claimed that he should have clearance from SHIELD, and the fact that he didn’t was—and I quote—‘total bullshit.’”

“Huh.” Steve stared straight ahead at the closed doors of the elevator, thinking over the possibilities. “Do you think there’s any chance he _should_ have clearance?”

“I suppose it is possible, sir. My explorations of SHIELD’s files reveals him to be a level-six agent—”

“So he is legitimately with SHIELD?”

“Inarguably, sir. Level six is one level lower than those classified to meet the Avengers; _handlers_ for the Avengers are level eight and above.”

“I wasn’t aware we had handlers,” Steve said, very dryly.

JARVIS paused—purely an affectation, given what Tony had said about his processing power. “As you say, sir. In fact, he has insisted that his clearance _predates_ SHIELD, and that seemed unusual enough that I have quarantined him in the other elevator.”

Steve stifled a laugh. “Not very sporting of you, JARVIS.”

“Perhaps not. I’ve allocated the unused conference room on level thirty-one for the confrontation, and I’ve taken the liberty of evacuating all personnel to other levels.”

“Nicely done.”

Steve really needed to stop using his Cap voice on the AI.

The room, when he entered it, was surprisingly banal for a Stark building: a single, ovular table dominated it, surrounded by chairs which looked comfortable but probably weren’t. Framed pictures of wilderness—waterfalls, forests, trails—hung on the walls without any explanation.

The carpet was beige. The chairs, navy.

The second elevator opened behind him, revealing—

_Bucky!_

Time slowed down to a series of fractured impressions:

Bucky was looking around, alert and on guard—

Bucky was relaxing, grinning ear to ear—

Bucky was moving, hurtling into Steve’s arms—

Bucky was holding him close, wrapped in his arms. His hair smelled of recycled air and shampoo, and very faintly under that of some sort of mud—

“You’re alive!” Steve gasped. It felt like the first breath he’d drawn in months. “Bucky, Bucky, Bucky—you’re _alive,_ how are you alive? I saw you _fall—"_ His voice cracked in the middle of the word. He couldn’t get it out, like if he just didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be true.

“Time travel,” Bucky supplied. “SHIELD managed to pull me back right before I hit the bottom of the gorge. They gave me a reason why it wouldn’t work until I fell, but I gotta admit, I wasn’t paying too much attention—holy shit, Steve!  _I’m_ alive?!  _You’re_ alive! You’re like—"

His arms squeezed tighter around Steve’s ribs for a second, clenching almost to the point of pain. Bucky turned his face into Steve’s shoulder and spoke without looking at him.

“From the very first moment I knew what we were to each other, I knew you were supposed to die. I spent all that time planning, trying to find a way—and then I lost my chance. I was sure—”

Steve was shaking. There were tears on his cheeks.

“—I was sure you were dead, that I was never going to see you again. But here you are, and I—I _love you,_ so much, and we’re _back together again_ and I can’t—”

Bucky stopped talking, and Steve nudged his head up with his cheek, pressed their lips together. Their kiss was salty and shaky, but perfect, lingering and joyful and miraculous.

Steve broke it first, smiling too hard to keep it up. Bucky’s eyes opened with a flutter, and when he saw Steve’s problem, he laughed at him. “Seriously, Steve?”

“I’m happy!" And he really was, too. For all that he had still lost so much, at least there was this. The one thing he had never expected to get back, and yet here Bucky was, warm in his arms and leaning in to kiss him again.

This time the kiss was deeper, hotter—a challenge Steve was only too ready to meet. He pushed, walking Bucky back until they hit the wall beside the elevator. Steve fenced Bucky in with his arms on either side of his head, sucking eagerly on the demanding tongue that swept into his mouth.

Bucky _melted,_ going soft and clinging in his arms, pressing against him from chest to groin. He squeezed Steve close to him, the gave a kick, spinning them around and through the open elevator doors. “Get us out of here,” he told Steve. His eyes were all pupil, dark and hot and demanding. Steve swallowed, his gaze dropping from Bucky’s eyes to his lips, red and full and shiny with kisses.

“...I have an apartment,” he remembered after a long, crazy moment during which he couldn’t think at all. “We could—I have an apartment. It’s new. I don’t know what it has, exactly—”

“I guarantee you we’ve made do with less,” Bucky pointed out. “Take us there.”

Steve nodded and opened his mouth, but he didn’t have to say anything before the elevator started moving. Which... actually was a pretty good reason not to do this in the elevator, come to think of it. Poor JARVIS.

Steve winced and disengaged, pulling back just far enough to be decent. Or... mostly decent, anyway: he was still sporting a pretty stiff erection.

Bucky obviously saw it, too; he licked his lips and took half a step forward, the kind of motion you would make if you were thinking about getting on your knees. “Don’t,” Steve groaned. “I—there are _cameras_ in here. Just let us get behind a closed _door,_ Jesus, Bucky!"

Bucky grinned at him dopily, then turned serious. “I thought you were dead for the last _four years,”_ he told him. “Thought you were gone forever, right up until fourteen hours ago. And yeah, I wanna do— _crazy_ things to you—pretty sure modern lube is gonna change your _life,_ Steve—but also... I really just want to _feel_ you. Solid, and warm, and not dead, and _mine._ So yeah, I was totally willing to despoil you in the elevator.” His eyes flickered, down the length of Steve’s body and back up again. By the time they had returned to Steve’s face, they were fierce and greedy, sending Steve’s pulse pounding hard in his throat, his body going impossibly tighter and more read. “And that’s just to get _started,”_ Bucky finished. “I wanna do so much more than just that.”

The lift slowed to a halt, and neither one of them broke eye contact. The doors opened. Steve swallowed. “Wanna meet the team?"

God, he hoped the answer was no.

Bucky shook his head, slowly, side to side, still not breaking eye contact. The air around them seemed charged, phosphorescent, like the moment before a lightning strike. Steve swallowed again, his mouth impossibly dry.

“Come on, then.” He held out his hand.

Bucky took it—the long-healed scar on the inside of his arm brushed against Steve’s wrist as he did so—and together, they stepped out into their future together.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: 
> 
> There is a depiction of torture, largely glossing over any details. (I would call the degree of detail "canon-typical depiction of torture," which... actually is a bit messed up.) The scene is characterized by pain and fear. Afterwards, there is a graphic depiction of a wound. 
> 
> Although there is no character death in this fic, there is the canon-typical fake out, and the emotions associated with the death of a loved on are rather... wallowed in. (They get better, though!)


End file.
